Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley mentioned it might be unhealthy for America to see Donald Trump “sitting in a jail cell” ought to he be convicted in any of the multitude of authorized circumstances towards him, however added she wouldn’t preemptively pardon him.
“For me, the last thing we need is an 80-year-old president sitting in jail because that’s just going to further divide our country,” Haley mentioned throughout a city corridor occasion with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday. “This is no longer about whether he’s innocent or guilty. This is about the fact: How do we bring the country back together?”
Trump presently faces 91 legal prices in 4 separate indictments and has been pressured to see-saw from the marketing campaign path to the courtroom because the Republican presidential main heats up. He handily gained the Iowa caucuses this week and presently leads within the New Hampshire main, in keeping with current polls. But he has amped up his assaults towards Haley as she sits firmly in second place within the state earlier than subsequent Tuesday’s presidential choice course of.
Haley advised Tapper on Thursday she wouldn’t preemptively pardon Trump like President Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon, saying she thinks “everything needs to play out.”
“And I honestly think President Trump would want that to happen,” she added.
Haley additionally rejected Trump’s calls Thursday that he ought to obtain “COMPLETE & TOTAL” immunity from legal prices, even for issues that “cross the line.”
She went on to solid herself as a viable various to the previous president and President Joe Biden, rejecting Trump’s calls that she doesn’t have any likelihood of securing the nomination.
“If he thinks I have no chance and I have no hope, then why is he running millions of dollars of ads against me?” she advised Tapper. “The reason he is throwing these temper tantrums is because he knows I do have a chance.”
“But rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. And everybody knows I’m right,” she added. “And we can’t continue down this path and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.”
Chaos has adopted Haley’s personal marketing campaign in current days after she mentioned on Fox News that America is “not a racist country” and had by no means been so. Tapper requested her concerning the feedback and the nation’s previous historical past of slavery on Thursday, however the former South Carolina governor mentioned the founders supposed to “do the right thing” after they drafted the Constitution.
“We have too many people with this national self-loathing,” she mentioned. “When you look back, it said all men are created equal. I think the intent was to do the right thing.”
