'America needs the crazy uncle': Tea Party activists explain why they gravitated to Trump

Nikki Haley was elected governor of South Carolina with the backing of Tea Party conservatives, but those true believers have moved on to Donald Trump — and they say they're not coming back.

The Tea Party movement was hugely influential in the state when Haley first got elected, but few of its organizations remain active and most of their activists drifted away from Haley during her time in office and were absorbed into the MAGA movement, reported the New York Times.

“The kind of folks that were Tea Party in 2010 are part of the MAGA movement in 2024,” said Scott Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. “We owe all this to the Tea Party.”

Many conservatives soured on Haley after she refused to block a federal grant related to the Affordable Care Act and called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the State House. Tea Partiers gravitated to Trump in 2016 after he spread conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birth certificate and the construction of an Islamic cultural center near the former site of the World Trade Center.

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“There’s just a group of people in this country, they’re very angry at the direction of this country,” said Colen Lindell, the founder of a Tea Party group in Aiken and a co-chair of Trump's first two campaigns in his county. “They feel like the country they grew up in is going away.”

The co-founder of another local Tea Party group who had hosted a Haley fundraiser during her gubernatorial campaign explained what she liked about the former president in comparison to his last remaining Republican rival.

“Yes, he’s the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving,” said former Tea Party activist Jane Page Thompson. “But right now America needs the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving — not the snowflake niece.”