Nikki Haley Hedges on Her Pledge to Support Republican Nominee – The New York Times
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In a Sunday interview, Ms. Haley suggested she might no longer feel bound to support the eventual Republican nominee and also said that she supported I.V.F. but that states should be able to ban it.
Nikki Haley suggested Sunday that she no longer felt bound by a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, but did not rule out endorsing former President Donald J. Trump, even as she said she didn’t know whether he would follow the Constitution as president.
In a more than 20-minute interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Ms. Haley repeatedly hedged on yes-or-no questions as her campaign heads into the 15 state races of Super Tuesday, having lost every Republican contest so far in which delegates have been awarded.
When the NBC host, Kristen Welker, asked whether she had ruled out endorsing Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley deflected, saying, “If you talk about an endorsement, you’re talking about a loss. I don’t think like that.”
After an extended back-and-forth related to her pledge last year to support her party’s nominee — which the Republican National Committee required candidates to sign in order to participate in debates — she referred to Mr. Trump’s recent endorsement of Lara Trump, who is married to his son Eric, to be a party co-chair.
“The R.N.C. is now not the same R.N.C.,” Ms. Haley said. “Now it’s Trump’s daughter-in-law.”
The closest Ms. Haley came to explicitly disavowing the pledge was when she said, “I’ll make what decision I want to make.” But she quickly added: “That’s not something I’m thinking about. And I think that while y’all think about that, I’m looking at the fact that we had thousands of people in Virginia, we’re headed to North Carolina, we’re going to continue to go to Vermont and Maine and all these states to go and show people that there is a path forward.”
She did not hold back on criticizing Mr. Trump, saying, for example, that she did not want a president who “calls his opponents ‘vermin,’” as Mr. Trump has, echoing rhetoric used by Hitler and Mussolini. When asked whether she believed Mr. Trump “would follow the Constitution,” she said: “I don’t know. I mean, you always want to think someone will. But I don’t know.”
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