Presidential candidate Nikki Haley vowed Sunday to pardon former President Donald Trump if she defeats him in the Republican primary and President Joe Biden in November.
Despite trying to stay tough on the candidate as a primary opponent, Haley previously hinted that she would forgive Trump at a town hall before finishing third to Trump in the Iowa Caucuses.
Just six days before a possible life-or-death primary in his home state of South Carolina, where Trump is widely favored, he confirmed that if the former president is found guilty, he would pardon him to unify the United States.
“I would forgive Donald Trump because I think it’s important for the country to move forward,” he said Sunday at a town hall in South Carolina.
Trump faces more than a half-dozen court cases related to election interference, the Jan. 6 riot and falsifying business records.
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley vowed Sunday to pardon former President Donald Trump if he defeats him in the Republican primary and President Joe Biden in November.
‘We have to leave the negativity and baggage behind. I don’t want this country to remain divided. “I don’t think it’s in the best interest of America to have an 80-year-old president sitting in jail and have everyone upset about it,” he added.
He admitted that pardoning Trump would not be “a question of innocence or guilt” because “it means he would have already been found guilty,” but said releasing him would be best for the nation.
“I think this would be the time where we would need to move forward and fix this,” he said.
Haley, the former South Carolina governor who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, attempted to bring her foreign policy skills to the stage when she criticized Trump over his relationship with China.
He called for a ban on Chinese-owned TikTok, and while he acknowledged that President Biden should be ashamed of himself for posting on the platform before the Super Bowl, in his eyes Trump is no good on the issue either.
“President Trump said he would ban TikTok, and when President Xi asked him not to, that fell by the wayside,” he said.
‘We should have banned it from the beginning. It’s incredibly dangerous.’
Despite admitting that the Republican Party had not served young people and Generation Z enough, he said of his preferred social platform: “The United States cannot be the last country to ban TikTok.”
Trump faces more than a half-dozen court cases related to election interference, the Jan. 6 riot and falsifying business records.
Just six days away from a possible do-or-die primary in her home state of South Carolina, where Trump is widely favored, Haley confirmed at a town hall that if the former president is found guilty, she would pardon him to unify the United States.
Haley has often criticized the app’s influence on Generation Z, saying it has led them to view “pro-Hamas” content following the terrorist attack on Israel last October.
He also criticized what he sees as Trump’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin following the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny last week.
“I think that’s why it’s so damaging when Trump said he would elect Putin and actually encouraged invading NATO allies, rather than supporting our allies,” he added.
While there are civil cases among them, Trump faces the possibility of prison if convicted in some of the cases.
Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, has previously said the pardon would be in vain like Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974.
The former South Carolina governor lost primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. In the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, Trump has 63 delegates to Haley’s 17.
Now she’s looking to pick up more delegates in South Carolina next week, banking on the fact that she was elected governor twice and is popular among Republicans in the Palmetto State. But polls show Trump is still well ahead of Haley in the South Carolina primary.
The former ambassador’s campaign insisted that she plans to stay in the race at least until Super Tuesday, where 15 different states will go to the polls in their respective primaries.