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President Joe Biden is playing for Nikki Haley’s former supporters.
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Haley supported Trump but urged the former president to appeal to her millions of voters.
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A self-described centrist Republican Haley voter said he just can’t support Donald Trump anymore.
This as told essay is based on a conversation with Roger, who is with the Haley Voters Working Group. The group consists of former primary supporters of U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley who are supporting President Joe Biden in the general election or are considering supporting the president. He is identified by name only because of the sensitivities of his ongoing work in defense policy. We also included a statement from Trump at the bottom of the story.
This election cycle, we’re speaking with voters, officials and others directly connected to politics to get a first-person look at the stakes of this election. We fact-check their statements, research our sources, and edit their answers for length and clarity.
I voted for former President Donald Trump twice. It is now clear that his behavior is one of the greatest threats to the Constitution we have ever seen. But a few words in the 14th Amendment wouldn’t even qualify him to be a candidate.
We see it in real time. I don’t want to be part of that. We are not an autocracy. I don’t know if I can vote for Joe Biden. And yes, his age is a legitimate concern. Father Time is undefeated. But if I have the choice between an autocrat and someone his age, I won’t choose the autocrat. No sir, no thank you.
Trump started to lose me when he started the shenanigans after losing the 2020 election. All those strange things in the run-up to January 6. And if it weren’t for Vice President Mike Pence, who is a great man, we would have been at a constitutional crossroads.
The former president will say anything, and he will do it with a straight face. He reminds me of PT Barnum; a sucker is born every minute. You just have to do your research. He has done enormous damage to himself. Not once has he accepted any responsibility for the mess he has found himself in.
Trump is now a convicted felon, although I thought the New York case was definitely the weakest case against him. Honestly, after working with classified documents during my military career, I looked at the list of things they found in the pool house and near the toilet. I was like, my god, he’s in trouble here. You can’t explain that away. He had several options to return those documents properly.
Trump’s treatment of Nikki Haley made matters worse.
I don’t like how Trump treated Nikki Haley. The swearing, what he said about her husband when he was deployed. God, he never finds the high ground. She’s one of the smartest people you’ll meet who understands all these issues. But she doesn’t play to the left; MAGA hates her.
It was a sting when she supported him. I had to think about it a bit. I watched the video several times. It must remain politically viable in the future. She is fundamentally a Republican. In the grand scheme of things, she never pretended to be anything else. And she said it was her personal choice. She made the caveat that she encouraged him to reach his voters. In retrospect, he was able to reach more than four million Haley voters all this time. He’s never done it before. The Biden campaign has indeed done that.
I never liked Trump’s tone or the way he behaved, but I did vote for him because I thought he was right about the border. His fiscal policy was largely sound. The border is a real problem. Many of us believe this issue started in January 2021, after President Biden was sworn in, because he turned around and rescinded all of Trump’s executive orders and policies. You have to understand the bigger picture here. The effect of flooding among these undocumented immigrants pushes the border into New York City, Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta. It brings the line everywhere because we don’t vet these people.
I’m an old-school Reagan fan, and Nikki Haley is a die-hard Republican. She understands the importance of Ukraine. She understands the importance of the way we express our foreign policy. And if you think about it, there’s a lot of crossover that the current administration is trying to do. Trump’s election would be a disaster for Ukraine. Forty-six Republicans voted against funding NATO – that scares me. It’s like no one pays attention to the things that really matter. We want democracy, we want freedom, and we want freedom to flourish because those are the true American values. We don’t want to send American troops to fight there.
Serving in the military had a profound impact on my life.
I met my wife on my first tour in Korea. We have now been married for 35 years. The military is a microcosm of our society as a whole. Growing up in rural South Carolina, I learned a lot about people by working alongside them. It takes you away from a myotic way of thinking. One of my assignments took me to the DMZ. You come face to face with North Korea. You see them living in the past. They come out in these old woolen Soviet uniforms. It’s very grim there. You kind of understand the dangers in the world.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, it got me. If you look at a card, you can see what the stakes are. Nothing good comes from Russian aggression. And so that’s what pushed me to be involved, adding my voice and perspective to the mix.
In response to Roger’s comments, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung sent the following statement to Business Insider: “President Trump dominated the primaries in record-breaking fashion and it wasn’t even close. Voters know that President Trump is the only person who will beat Joe Biden and take back the White House. It was revealed that investigators in that case were likely involved in tampering with evidence and mishandling those documents. That’s why a motion was filed earlier this week to dismiss the case if Joe Biden were re-elected. A catastrophe for America, President Trump will put America first, instead of getting into more wars and conflicts as Biden has done.” (Editor’s note: Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team has determined the order of documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago during the investigation into classified documents may have shifted from when FBI agents originally seized the material.)
Read the original article on Business Insider
