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The long run

Nikki Haley’s Path From Trump Critic to

Defender and Back
As ambassador the United Nations, Ms. Haley strove to stay in the
to
president’s favor and avoided some battles to change his mind on
contentious issues.

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Nikki Haley has stepped up her criticism of Donald J. Trump’s norm-breaking foreign policy. But as ambassador to the United Nations, she
strove to stay on his good side. “I just know that’s who he is,” she said at the time. Al Drago for The New York Times
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full article York Times. 117

By Sharon LaFraniere
Dec. 5, 2023 Updated 11:46 a.m. ET

When Nikki Haley was governor of South Carolina in 2016, she said
she was appalled by Donald J. Trump’s threat to ban all Muslims
from entering the United States should he become president. Ms.
Haley, herself the child of Indian immigrants, called the pledge
“absolutely un-American,” and part of a pattern of “unacceptable”
comments and acts.
Just two days after she joined Mr. Trump’s new administration in
January 2017 as ambassador to the United Nations, she had to
confront the issue anew. Mr. Trump barred travelers and refugees
from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United
States for 90 days.
At a hastily called White House meeting, other senior
administration officials objected, saying the prohibition would
endanger refugees already en route to the United States and would
hurt families of Iraqis who had long worked closely with the
American military in that nation.
“I don’t remember Nikki Haley saying anything,” said Kristie
Kenney, then a top State Department official, who sat in on
meeting. Six weeks later, in one of her first interviews as
ambassador, Ms. Haley defended the ban, saying it was directed
against countries with terrorist activity, not against Muslims.
Now, as she tries to persuade Republican voters to cast Mr. Trump
aside and hand her the mantle, Ms. Haley is reverting to her role as
Trump critic. As her bid for the White House has picked up steam,
she has warned voters that “we cannot have four years of chaos,
vendettas and drama,” an obvious reference to his White House
years. “America needs a captain who will steady the ship, not
capsize it,” she added. Unlike Mr. Trump, she has said, she would
not praise dictators and would “have the backs of our allies.”
But when Ms. Haley had a chance to influence Mr. Trump, she
chose her battles carefully. In interviews with more than a dozen
former senior administration officials, most said that while Ms. Editors’ Picks
Haley at times expressed her views frankly, they rarely witnessed
her going to the mat, as some other senior aides did, to try to head
Is It Too Late to Get
off or moderate what they saw as Mr. Trump’s rash moves. a Flu Shot?

Ms. Haley made herself a reliable defender of the president to the

outside world, often trying to soften the edges of his most abrasive I’m White. Should I

Repatriate My
decisions. Privately, she carefully guarded what she later called African Art?
her “amazingly good relationship” with Mr. Trump and avoided
Meet Charles
some of the internal fights that would have pitted her against him. Melton, the
Breakout Star of
“I don’t pick up the phone and say, ‘What are you doing?’” she said ‘May December’
in an interview in March 2017, acknowledging that she was at times
taken back by some of his public statements. “I just know that’s
who he is.”
Ms. Haley’s former colleagues could not recall her in the forefront
of fights to keep Mr. Trump from imposing trade tariffs on
American allies, or rushing into an unprecedented summit with
North Korea’s dictator, or canceling America’s longstanding
military exercises with South Korea, or banning Iraqis from
entering the country. It fell mainly to others to defend NATO from
Mr. Trump’s attacks, they said. Many spoke on the condition of
anonymity in order to describe internal deliberations.
“I think that Haley understood, in an almost visceral way, the
importance of maintaining a good relationship with the president,”
said Thomas A. Shannon Jr., who served as under secretary of
state for political affairs for the first half of Ms. Haley’s tenure.
“She did not take on this job to do battle with the president.”
Not everyone agrees that she held her fire. “Nikki Haley never
pulled any punches with Donald Trump or with anybody,” said H.R.
McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser from early 2017 to
early 2018 and a key ally of Ms. Haley. “Oftentimes, she told him
what he didn’t want to hear.”
That is the impression Ms. Haley is trying to make with voters, as
she casts herself as no-nonsense, no-drama alternative to Mr.
Trump, who leads in polls in Iowa by some 30 percentage points.
“If he was doing something wrong, I showed up in his office or I
picked up the phone and said you cannot do this,” she said last
week in Wolfeboro, N.H.
Both Mr. McMaster and Ms. Haley point to her stance on Russia as
evidence that she stood up to Trump. In her 2019 memoir on her
U.N. tenure, Ms. Haley said she phoned the president directly to
complain that he was overly deferential to Russian President
Vladimir V. Putin in a July 2018 meeting, telling him: “The
Russians aren’t our friends.”
Asked to point to other examples, her campaign did not respond.
Nor did her aides answer questions about whether and how she
used her influence with the president on a variety of issues that
galvanized other senior administration officials.
There were clear dividends to keeping Mr. Trump’s favor. The
ambassadorship allowed Ms. Haley, who had never held office
outside of South Carolina, to gain valuable foreign policy
experience and to build the political brand that she now hopes will
carry her to the White House.
She also achieved a rare graceful exit from the administration,
escaping the public insults the president rained on so many of his
top aides. Instead, he praised her as “fantastic.”

Staying on Trump’s Good Side

Ms. Haley has looked to cast herself as a no-drama alternative to Mr. Trump. Maansi Srivastava/The New York
Times

Ms. Haley’s position gave her the luxury of distance from some
scorching White House debates. Other senior administration
officials recalled sprinting to the Oval Office to try to forestall some
of Mr. Trump’s orders. Stationed in New York, answering to a
president who cared little about the United Nations, Ms. Haley was
to some degree on the periphery.

Nonetheless, she had unusually good access to the president. Mr.

Trump had granted her wish to be seated on the National Security
Council, over the objections of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to
whom she ostensibly reported. And he took her calls, which former
Trump aides described as frequent.
Because the Trump White House operated in an unconventional
fashion, often without the customary briefing papers and
deliberate discussions, senior administration officials created
unusual and shifting alliances in hopes of influencing the president.
They tried to rope in like-minded officials, even on issues outside
their portfolio.
Several former senior administration officials said they did not
view Ms. Haley as a useful ally in countering Mr. Trump because
they thought she was unlikely to challenge the president directly.
That was the case, they said, in the effort to keep Mr. Trump from
imposing steel and aluminum tariffs against American allies like
Canada. Gary D. Cohn, the White House economic adviser, led that
fight, backed by a group that included Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis and Mr. McMaster, but not Ms. Haley.
Nor was she central to the endeavor by other senior foreign policy
advisers to take Iraq off the list of seven Muslim-majority nations
covered by Mr. Trump’s travel ban. Mr. McMaster, Mr. Tillerson,
Mr. Mattis and John F. Kelly, then head of homeland security,
argued that the ban would punish Iraqis who for over a decade
worked with the U.S. government to fight extremists.
In a series of heated White House meetings, ending up in the Oval
Office, they faced off against the White House advisers Steve
Bannon and Stephen Miller, finally swaying the president to their
side. While Mr. McMaster said Ms. Haley agreed Iraq should be
dropped from the list, others who described those meetings make
no mention of her.
Guy Snodgrass, Mr. Mattis’s former chief speechwriter, said he
knew of conversations in which the defense secretary and other
senior officials discussed how best to influence the president. But
he was not aware, he said, of any interaction with Ms. Haley or her
staff.

Ms. Haley was viewed as having shrewd political instincts — and

also clear aspirations beyond the United Nations. Mr. Trump was
wary of her ambitions, according to people familiar with his views.
Some thought she tended carefully to her relationship with the
president partly to safeguard them.
“I thought she went out of the way not to take Trump on. Her
objective, I thought, was to stay on his good side,” said John R.
Bolton, who succeeded Mr. McMaster as national security adviser
in March 2018.

In her memoir, Ms. Haley recounted one instance, apparently in

late 2017, when Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Kelly, then White House chief
of staff, tried to enlist her support in holding the president in check.
While they claimed that they needed to band together for the good
of the country, she wrote, she saw them as disloyal.

Ms. Haley later told Fox News that she reported the conversation
to Mr. Trump and Mr. McMaster. Mr. McMaster said in an
interview that she understood the importance of duty.
Mr. Tillerson has denied ever trying to undermine the president.
Mr. Kelly has said that he gave the president the best advice he
could.

Dealing With Dictators

Ms. Haley called Mr. Trump to criticize his 2018 meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in
Helsinki. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Ms. Haley has written that she agreed with most of Mr. Trump’s
major policies, including his decisions to withdraw from the Iran
nuclear deal and abandon the Paris climate accord. His posture
toward Russia, however, was a steady source of friction.
One former senior official said that the only times the president
would become angry with Ms. Haley were when she criticized Mr.
Putin in public, and that he would order his chief of staff to tell her
to stop.

Still,she called Mr. Trump to complain about his 2018 summit in

Helsinki, where the president had ignited a bipartisan uproar by
suggesting he believed Mr. Putin’s denials of Russian interference
in the 2016 U.S. elections over the assertions of U.S. intelligence
agencies. “You made it sound like we were beholden to them,” she
said she told him.
Later that year, she persuaded the president to toughen up the
administration’s talking points after Russian forces seized three
Ukrainian naval ships and threatened to turn the Sea of Azov into a
Russian lake, according to Mr. Bolton’s memoir.
But even as she objected to Mr. Trump’s approach toward Mr.
Putin, she has excused it. In her book, she wrote that she
understood why he seemed to let Mr. Putin off the hook in Helsinki.
“He was trying to keep communication open with Putin, just as he
had with Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping,” she
wrote, then went on to extol his ability to disarm people.
Similarly, Ms. Haley suggested that Mr. Trump meant well when he
praised Mr. Kim as a “talented” leader who “loves his people” and
that he just didn’t understand how his words would be received.
Since starting her campaign, Ms. Haley has said Mr. Trump “was
too friendly” with Mr. Kim, “a thug and a tyrant” who has been
“terrible to his people.” (One of Ms. Haley’s biggest
accomplishments as ambassador was garnering support from
Russia and China for a series of economic sanctions against North
Korea after it conducted a battery of missile tests.)
Mr. Trump himself has noticed her frequent oscillations: “Every
time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later,”
he told Vanity Fair in late 2021 “I guess she gets the base,” .

referring to his popularity with Republican voters she is now

courting.

‘We Shouldn’t Have Followed Him’

Ms. Haley had promised in early 2021 not to run against Mr. Trump for the Republican presidential
nomination. Samuel Corum for The New York Times

In trying to explain why she is so much more critical of him now

than before, Ms. Haley has said it is Mr. Trump who has changed,
not her.
As late as December 2020, after Mr. Trump lost the presidency to
Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Haley still took a forgiving stance toward
him. She told Politic o that although she spoke with Mr. Trump after
the election, she did not urge him to concede because he sincerely
believed he had won and couldn’t be convinced otherwise. It was a
version of the “that’s who he is” argument she had made when she
first joined his administration.

Then, after his supporters ransacked the Capitol in January 2021,

she told Politico there were no excuses for his behavior. “He went
down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed
him,” she said.
After she announced this February that she would run against him
for the presidential nomination — after promising not to in early
2021 — a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump’s
campaign characterized her as an opportunist, “only in it for
herself. ”
Ms. Haley addressed that kind of criticism in an essay in The Wall
Street Journal in 2021. She wrote that Mr. Trump had been a good
president but had gone astray, and said she could not “defend the
indefensible.”
“If that means I want to have it ‘both ways,’” she added, “so be it.”

Reporting was contributed by Kate Kelly Peter Baker Michael D. Shear Jazmine Ulloa , , , ,

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Susan Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed
, .

research.

Sharon LaFraniere is an investigative reporter currently focusing on Republican

candidates in the 2024 presidential election. More about Sharon LaFraniere
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The Run-Up to the 2024 Election

President Biden
Democratic anxiety over the president’s chances
victory in the 2024 election of is
intensifying. Here is why a major primary challenge to the incumbent is
unlikely despite those concerns.
At an annual gathering in Arizona, Democratic governors offered six ways they
believe Biden can raise his standing ahead of next year’s election .

Donald Trump
A second term for the former president, who
has long exhibited authoritarian
impulses, could be more extreme than the first. Here’s why .

While voting has yet to begin in the Republican primary, Trump has casually
weighed the pros and cons of some possible contenders to be his running mate .

Other Candidates
Chris Christie: Several anti-Trump Republican donors and strategists are pushing
the former governor of New Jersey to end his presidential campaign and back
Nikki Haley .

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: A super PAC backing the independent candidate is

planning to spend $10 million to $15 million to get him on the ballot in 10 states ,

an effort that could heighten Democratic concerns about his potential role of
spoiler in 2024.
Nikki Haley: The former governor of South Carolina has been rising in the polls
thanks to her gains with educated and relatively moderate Republicans and
independents, but that is also a big liability in today’s G.O.P., Nate Cohn writes .

Ron DeSantis: The Florida governor said that, elected president, he would if

pursue legislation that would “supersede” the Affordable Care Act , echoing
Trump’s comments, which Democrats have seized upon .

Doug Burgum: The North Dakota governor, a wealthy former software executive
who hoped a back-to-basics appeal on the economy would propel him forward in
the G.O.P. primary, has dropped out of the race .

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