Former President Donald Trump officially locked up enough delegates to become the presumptive GOP presidential nominee after winning Tuesday's Republican primary in Georgia. However, he has yet to make any efforts to unite his party after dispatching his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley — his last remaining rival — on Super Tuesday.
In her concession speech, Haley refused to endorse Trump and said the former president would have to "earn" the votes of her supporters between March and November. Trump has so far not made any direct pleas to Haley voters, and continues to mock the former South Carolina governor on social media. In an interview with Politico, one unnamed "top Haley donor" said Trump ignores the sizable swath of GOP voters who were in Haley's corner at his own peril.
"At the end of the day, it’s just hubris and this belief that no matter what, they’ve got this, and they don’t need Nikki’s voters," the donor said. "I think this is all going to end badly [in the general election] and Haley will have proven to be correct. Everybody is going to deserve what they get here."
"People that want to go and play in that swamp can go and do that," the donor added.
Art Pope, who is a Republican kingmaker in the battleground state of North Carolina, is the former chair of the powerful Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity. He told Politico that he is holding out on endorsing the ex-president depending on who Trump picks for his 2024 running mate and the "tone" of this summer's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
"[A]s far as the message he’s sending in his public comments and his interviews and his rallies, he has not been very conciliatory," Pope said. "And on the positions and on the issues, he’s doubling down, like on his proposal for the largest tax increase ever proposed by a Republican candidate for president with his tariff tax.”
Pope is far from the only prominent Republican to not endorse Trump. On Friday, former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News' Martha McCallum that he would not be supporting his former boss in 2024. And retired general John Kelly, who was Trump's longest-serving White House chief of staff, recently told CNN journalist Jim Sciutto that the former president praised German dictator Adolf Hitler in private, saying he was taken in by "the tough guy thing."
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While Trump easily won the Georgia Republican presidential primary, tens of thousands of Republicans cast their ballots for Haley, many of whom did so after she formally dropped out of the race. This suggests that President Joe Biden may be able to peel some Republicans away toward his side in the critical swing state that he won by roughly 12,000 total votes in 2020. Many of those voters were in DeKalb County and Fulton County, which are both part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.
After Super Tuesday, Trump gloated about defeating Haley, telling his Truth Social followers that he "trounced" his former UN ambassador. Biden took a different approach, praising Haley's "courage" for standing up to the ex-president and warning voters about the "chaos" a second Trump term would bring.
"Donald Trump made it clear he doesn't want Nikki Haley's supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign," Biden stated earlier this month. "I know there is a lot we won't agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America's adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground."
Click here to read Politico's full report.
