A slew of Donald Trump's former rivals took the stage at the Republican National Convention this week to proclaim their loyalty to the man they once ran against. The most notable turnaround was that of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who stayed in the 2024 race the longest and battered Trump as "unhinged" and his potential election to a second term as "suicide for this country."
The decision by Trump to invite Haley, and Haley's acceptance, came just hours after an assassination attempt on the former president, perhaps underscoring the unifying effect it's had on the Republican Party, though she had already agreed to release her delegates to him before that. On Tuesday night, she told her supporters in her speech that "you don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him.”
“I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” she said, with Trump watching from his VIP suite.
Other presidential rivals also paid homage, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott, who eulogized Trump as an "American lion" who was saved by God from a gunman's bullet.
One 2024 candidate who did not join the lineup was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was among the first mainstream GOP candidates to endorse Trump in 2016 after his first failed run that year. Instead, he went on ABC News, where he is a regular contributor, to criticize Haley for her opportunism.
"What we saw in her speech tonight was neither courage nor convictions, it was really tortured ambition," Christie said. "She was on that stage because she is tortured by her own ambition. She had to go up there if she wanted to run again in 2018 — in her own mind. And that was more important than standing up for the things she represented in the Republican primaries about Donald Trump being unfit, unhinged, unqualified to be president of the United States."
Haley's supporters, some of whom voted for her in primaries even after she had dropped out, are "not going to be persuaded by Nikki Haley to vote for someone, they're going to be ashamed they voted for her in the first place," Christie continued.
Haley's not the only MAGA convert trying to run away from her history of criticizing Trump. The former president's own pick for vice president, JD Vance, once called Trump a "moral disaster" and possibly "America's Hitler," but strove to make amends since running for a Senate seat in 2022.
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