Nikki Haley wasn’t invited to the Republican National Convention.
But after Donald J. Trump, her former boss and onetime rival for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, was injured in an assassination attempt over the weekend, Mr. Trump’s campaign called and asked her to come. Ms. Haley obliged, and is set to take the stage Tuesday.
The moment is meant as a show of unity during a campaign that has highlighted rifts within the Republican Party — partly because of Ms. Haley’s hard-fought bid. The convention speech could also signal an important comeback for Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, who has kept a relatively low profile since she dropped her presidential bid this year.
“I think we ‘Make America Great’ by making us one, by making us whole, and I think it is very meaningful to have this opportunity for her,” said Kim Borchers, a Republican Party official from Kansas who voted for Ms. Haley. She added that Mr. Trump was doing exactly what Ms. Haley had asked him to do when she left the primary: reaching out to her strong base of supporters.
If Ms. Haley’s appearance is in prime time, that would also suggest that Mr. Trump is indeed ready to make amends, political strategists and convention attendees said.
But some of Ms. Haley’s delegates and supporters are now echoing her words to Mr. Trump when she left the race: This will now be Ms. Haley’s moment for choosing.
Many hope she will use her remarks to toe the line on the unity theme. They also want what many of her voters have always wanted — to see her stand for something, namely the more traditionally conservative values at odds with parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda. Perhaps the most prominent of those values has been her stalwart support of Ukraine and opposition to Mr. Trump’s isolationist approach to foreign policy.
Eric Levine, a New York lawyer and Haley donor who has since said he is voting for Mr. Trump, said the stakes were even higher now that Mr. Trump had chosen Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, as his running mate. Mr. Vance is seen as one of the most isolationist members of his party.
”As someone in the Reagan wing of the party, I was hoping for someone with a broader appeal who would not just unite the party, but the country as well,” he said. “The pick makes it all the more imperative that Nikki Haley remind Republicans why America must remain engaged in the world and why isolationism is so dangerous.”
Ms. Haley spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2020, when she invoked former President Ronald Reagan and his first United Nations ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to extol Mr. Trump’s record and highlight her own biography as she sought to make the case for Mr. Trump’s re-election. She warned against the influence of socialism in the United States and Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, saying the “the socialist left would be a disaster for our economy.”
Ms. Haley has had a long relationship with Mr. Trump, and has tended to calibrate her approach to the former president. She wrote in one of her memoirs that Mr. Trump began following her career when she won the Republican primary for South Carolina governor in 2010. But their primary contest this year ended on sour terms.
He lobbed racist and sexist attacks, questioning her citizenship (because her parents are immigrants), her ambition and her intelligence — even calling her “birdbrain.” She denounced him as a dangerous and “unhinged” agent of chaos and a grumpy old man.
Kevin Madden, a former Republican operative who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 and 2008 presidential campaigns, said Ms. Haley’s speech could take on greater significance in a presidential race that will be won at the margins. Even after Ms. Haley suspended her campaign, she continued to draw notable percentages of independents, Republicans and moderate Democrats in primary contests.
“There is a potential for Haley’s speech to set up the permission structure for those voters to return to the Republican Party,” he said of independents and what he called Republican “conscientious objectors in the Trump era.”
Some of those objectors remain steadfast.
Last week, Ms. Haley said she was releasing her 97 delegates and urged them to support Mr. Trump. Outside the convention center in Milwaukee, an alternate delegate from Michigan, Jason Watts, said three of the four Haley delegates from his state had refused to attend the convention because they disapproved of Mr. Trump. He said he had decided to come nonetheless and record his vote for Ms. Haley to continue standing for those traditional Republicans dissatisfied with the nominee.
“If she comes out of this convention as a surrogate for Trump, then I think it’s done — I’ve moved on,” he said. “If she comes out of this the dignified ambassador riding into the sunset, then I give her all the kudos and props and wish her well.”
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