With Super Tuesday voters (except in Vermont) having given a resounding “no” to Nikki Haley, she’s finally yielded to the inevitable and is suspending her campaign. As of this writing, though, she’s refusing to endorse Trump. Her refusal is understandable, given her values and constituency, but it would be better for America if she’d give Trump her blessing.

Super Tuesday’s results were unequivocal. Add those results to previous primaries, and one sees that outside of D.C. and Vermont, Republican voters want Trump to be their candidate, with Trump winning 995 delegates so far, to Haley’s 89. With insurmountable odds against her, Haley finally got the message and will be suspending her campaign:

Breaking News: Nikki Haley will suspend her presidential campaign Wednesday morning and won't immediately endorse Donald Trump https://t.co/clqPbIrKBL https://t.co/clqPbIrKBL

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 6, 2024

However, as the above tweet notes, what Haley will not do, at least for now, is endorse Donald Trump.

Nikki’s decision not to endorse Trump is understandable. As Haley demonstrated when she swept the Republican primary in D.C., she is not an America First candidate. She is a Washington, D.C. First candidate. Her brand of conservativism comes from the Uniparty, Vichy Republican, RINO side of the aisle. Yes, she espouses some form of fiscal conservativism and supports an aggressive military posture, but on other core issues, she’s always going to start with strong conservative statements and end with the Swamp’s values.

As Sarah Longwell, a Bulwark writer (i.e., a publication hostile to Trump), presciently explained last year,

While many Republican voters may be moving off Trump the man, the forces that he unleashed within the party—economic populism, isolationist foreign policy, election denialism, and above all, an unapologetic and vulgar focus on fighting culture war issues—remain incredibly popular with GOP voters.

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Haley would be the frontrunner in a Republican party that no longer exists.

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Is she the MAGA devotee who loyally served in the Trump administration? Or the sober and serious foreign policy heavyweight? Or the reform-minded former governor of South Carolina who signed the bill to take down the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds?

Haley showed her tone-deafness to conservative concerns and her openness to leftist shibboleths when, at the height of Ron DeSantis’s epic battle with Disney because of its efforts to groom America’s children into the LGBTQ cult, she opined that, were she still South Carolina governor, she would ask Disney to relocate to her state. Haley has also repeatedly played the leftist race and woman cards during her campaign, two things that are the opposite of what conservative voters want. They share MLK’s dream of a color-blind America and are alive to the toxicity and entitlement of third-wave feminism.

Given her Uniparty values, it’s no surprise that Nikki cannot endorse Trump. The Uniparty is the Swamp, and Trump is the anti-Swamp. It’s not just that he espouses values the Swamp opposes, which was already true in 2016 and 2020. It’s that, after four years of the Swamp’s efforts to destroy him, a returned Trump would be loaded for bear.  

However, while Nikki doesn’t want to endorse Trump, Trump would be wise to extend an olive branch to Nikki. That’s because she averaged about 30% of the votes in most Republican primaries. These are either voters who can’t get past Trump’s personality even if they agree with his politics or they espouse Nikki’s brand of Republican politics. Trump needs those voters.

Most of Nikki’s voters, of course, will understand that she is no longer on the ballot in November. Instead, there’ll be a Manichean stand-off between Democrat policies (open borders, destroyed military, sexualized and mutilated children, a broken economy, institutional racism, the rule of law, crime-ridden communities, the end of free speech and dissent, etc.) and conservative policies (the opposite of everything Democrat). The time for protest votes will be over. The choices will be stark, and wise people, even those who dislike Trump, will still vote for him.

But there will always be the holdouts. In an election in which every vote counts, Nikki’s statement to them that it’s morally okay to vote for Trump will matter. I hope she can rise above her RINO-ism, but I can’t say I’m optimistic. I haven’t forgotten that Trump’s inability to carry out his policies in the first two years of his presidency was because of Republican opposition when they controlled Congress. For a significant number, America-first policies were anathema. Instead, it was the Uniparty today, the Uniparty tomorrow, the Uniparty forever.

Image: Nikki Haley (cropped). YouTube screen grab.