Nikki Haley Finally Admits Her Campaign Was Going Nowhere

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley abandoned her long-shot bid for the White House on Wednesday. Her departure makes it official: Donald Trump owns the Republican Party.

The decision comes after Nikki secured only 89 delegates this entire Republican primary season, with Trump sweeping nearly every election on Super Tuesday.

“I am filled with gratitude for the outpouring of support we’ve received from all over our great country, but the time has now come for us to suspend our campaign,” Haley said in a speech that pinpointed debt, socialism, and “America’s retreat” from the international stage as reasons for the country’s struggles.

She then bizarrely heralded former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and congratulated Donald Trump on becoming the presumptive Republican nominee come July.

“Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said, quote, ‘Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind,’” Haley said. “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him.”

Haley did not endorse Trump in her resignation speech Wednesday, instead urging the former president to earn the support of all Republican and independent voters.

Haley was the last major Republican contender to the former president, despite polling gaps that sometimes placed Trump more than 50 percentage points ahead of her, according to aggregated polling data by FiveThirtyEight. Still, the former ambassador was able to drill a sore spot into the Trump campaign, festering insecurities in the typically boorish and bombastic GOP front-runner that took the form of fierce anti-Haley messaging.

Unlike many other Republicans this primary season—especially Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, the last recent major contenders to drop out—Haley revealed herself as one of the few candidates willing to at least somewhat criticize Trump. Despite still promising to pardon him, she also called him a liar, questioned his mental fitness, and argued that Trump used his office to “buddy up with dictators.”

She also took aim at Trump’s legal woes, blasting his victim mentality in particular. “There were a couple more court cases and a couple more judgments, and now he’s been talking about being a victim,” Haley said on Monday. “At no point is he ever talking about the American people.… All he’s doing is talking about himself.”

But Haley’s run was not without controversy. In the final months of her campaign, Haley obviously struggled in her answers to placate both moderate Republicans and increasingly radical voters on the far right, even when it came to answering point-blank questions with obvious answers, like the cause of the Civil War.

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how the government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said during a town hall in December, notably failing to mention slavery in a long-winded answer.

In January, Haley tried to brush off that failure by playing the “Black friend” card, explaining that she “knew half of South Carolinians saw the Confederate flag as heritage and tradition” and that “the other half of South Carolinians saw it as slavery and hate.”

That same month, Haley—the daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants—tried to argue that America was not and never had been a racist country, despite several passages in her 2012 autobiography, Can’t Is Not an Option, that recount apparent discrimination on the basis of her race.

Regardless of her inability to wrangle her own truths to national voters, Haley’s ability to offer an intraparty alternative to Trump’s politics proved an incredible boon to her campaign. In January CBS News/YouGov matchups between the top Republican contenders and President Joe Biden, Haley came out head and shoulders above her competition, leading with 54 percent of the vote against Biden’s 45 percent thanks to support from moderates, independents, and voters with college degrees. That was a much wider margin than Trump, who was predicted to win against Biden by just two percentage points with 50 percent of the vote.

Some also initially predicted that Haley would have a baked-in advantage against her primary opponent as Trump faced challenges in Colorado and Maine over his eligibility to run on the ballot due to the January 6 insurrection. But the Supreme Court threw cold water on that idea on Monday when it blocked those efforts.

Ultimately, Haley proved to be the final obstacle to Trump before the former president faced down Biden again in a grueling general election rematch. And although she fought the good fight against a Republican conference that largely wanted nothing to do with her, Haley’s resignation proves that the current iteration of the GOP prefers a man who is on the line for 91 criminal charges, has been found liable for rape and defamation, and found guilty of bank fraud that was likened by a judge to Bernie Madhoff’s Ponzi scheme—over everybody else.

Trump wasted little time ripping Haley apart after her announcement, writing on TruthSocial that she got “TROUNCED.”

“At this point, I hope she stays in the ‘race’ and fights it out until the end!” Trump mocked, before extending an invitation to Haley’s supporters to “join the greatest movement in the history of our Nation.”

Biden also extended an olive branch to the stranded voters, pushing a message of unity with the moderate conservative demographic.

“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… I hope and believe we can find common ground,” the president said in a statement.

This story has been updated.

Senator Bob Menedez’s charges just keep adding up.

A new superseding federal indictment on Tuesday charges the senior Democratic senator from New Jersey and his wife, Nadine, with obstruction of justice, adding to previous indictments alleging the couple accepted bribes in exchange for using Menendez’s political position to benefit the governments of Qatar and Egypt.

It’s not the first Qatar-related indictment for Menendez. A superseding indictment in January already accused him of accepting lavish gifts in exchange for helping to secure an investment from a company with ties to Qatar to help New Jersey business tycoon Fred Dabies.

The latest charge claims that Menendez and his wife, Nadine, accepted bribes to help the government of Qatar itself, engaging in a corrupt relationship with Dabies and two other New Jersey businessmen, Wael Hana and Jose Uribe. Senator Menendez faces a dozen new counts, and 16 charges total, including obstruction of justice, bribery, and extortion.

The bribes came in the form of gold, cash, mortgage payments, a luxury vehicle, payments from a low- or no-show job, and other considerations, according to the latest indictment.

When Menedez was first indicted in October, he announced that he would not resign. While he has not yet made clear his reelection plans, he faces a tough primary challenge this June, with Representative Andy Kim and the state’s first lady, Tammy Murphy, both taking him on. Meanwhile, Menendez’s trial is due to start in May. A February poll shows him behind both Kim and Murphy.

After losing the second defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, Donald Trump has a new demand for Judge Lewis Kaplan: Reduce the $83.3 million penalty, or do the whole trial over again.

In a motion filed in court on Tuesday, Trump’s attorneys argued that Kaplan had overstepped by curtailing the bombastic disruptor’s testimony, limiting his answers to just a handful of pre-reviewed questions in an attempt to limit Trump’s courtroom outbursts and to streamline an off-the-rails trial.

“This Court’s erroneous decision to dramatically limit the scope of President Trump’s testimony almost certainly influenced the jury’s verdict, and thus a new trial is warranted,” the motion reads.

Trump’s team also claimed that the harm inflicted upon Carroll was “garden variety,” and that the columnist’s legal team failed to tie the harassment she endured after going public with sexual assault allegations to the GOP primary front-runner. All in all, Trump’s lawyers requested the judge downsize the self-purported billionaire’s penalty to a fraction of the jury-ordered figure, describing some of the fines as “grossly excessive.”

The filing is, frankly, a long-shot bid, and Carroll’s team has already opposed the motion, calling one of his arguments “laughable.”

Meanwhile, Trump insisted in interviews Tuesday that he has “a lot of money” and doesn’t “worry about money,” despite trying to worm his way out of his legal comeuppance—of which Carroll’s judgment amounts to just one small part. Trump has twice asked Kaplan to delay requiring payment to Carroll. The first time was last month, and Kaplan denied but asked Carroll’s attorneys to respond. In a filing last week, Carroll’s lawyers blasted Trump’s legal reasoning for reducing the fine, saying it “boils down to nothing more than ‘trust me.’”

Trump asked again on Monday, requesting a reduced bond of $24.475 million. Kaplan shut him down again.

A 1,439-page document dump from a settlement involving Donald Trump ally Kenneth Chesebro reveals the inner machinations of the so-called architect of Trump’s 2020 fake elector scheme.

Text messages between Chesebro and another Trump lawyer, Jim Troupis, reveal a man hunting down every possible loophole in an effort to undermine the electoral transfer of power.

“Republicans have 26 states,” Chesebro messaged Troupis on January 3, 2021. “McConnell should not allow a vote either, because Republicans electing Pence would look illegitimate—would seem like Pence froze the process to become acting president instead of Pelosi.”

“Republicans electing Harris would be a horror,” he added, noting that “McConnell would need to protect his caucus from such a Hobson’s choice.”

Three days later, Chesebro attended the Capitol riot, tagging along with a group including InfoWars’ Alex Jones. In private messages, Chesebro celebrated having helped devise a plot to prevent Joe Biden’s peaceful succession.

But hours later, his messaging had changed, instead trafficking conspiracies that the riot had been instigated by “antifa” rather than Trump’s MAGA crowd. The following day, Chesebro turned his ire onto former Vice President Mike Pence, whom he wanted to publicly blame for the fringe plan’s failure, claiming Pence had given Trump and his allies false hope.

“He had top-flight advice available to him more than a month ago,” Chesebro wrote on January 7, 2021. “I sketched what we had in mind for alternate electors, with Pence not opening envelopes. I detected no enthusiasm for any deviation from the [Electoral Count Act].”

“I now think Pence had decided by then not to do anything to press the envelope or create a test case, but decided to not be straight with the president.”

“If I’m right, Pence gave him false hope,” Chesebro continued. “He allowed Trump to hear of valid legal theories from Rudy [Giuliani] and [John] Eastman which gave him hope, which was crushed when Pence suddenly crushed them at the end.”

In other delusional messages, Chesebro wrote that Trump could potentially defuse the tension after the riot by inviting Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over for coffee on the morning of the forty-sixth president’s inauguration and by making “a few well-placed jokes.”

Last month, Chesebro was caught lying to Michigan prosecutors about his social media presence ahead of and during the scheme to overthrow the 2020 election, hiding an account with dozens of posts that reveal his role in the plot and illustrate a far more aggressive election subversion strategy.

Chesebro has struck a plea deal in Trump’s Georgia election interference case and has so far managed to skirt charges in other states affected by the fake elector scheme thanks to his cooperation with prosecutors. But all that could change with the attorney’s true opinions and dirty laundry in the air.

In an announcement Tuesday, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced that she will not be running for reelection in November.

The move comes as polls show her in a distant third behind Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake, who ran a losing campaign for governor of Arizona in 2020. Sinema chose to leave the Democratic Party in 2022 and become an independent, and until Tuesday’s announcement, was running for reelection without a party affiliation.

In a delusional video posted on X (formerly Twitter), Sinema pretended like she did a ton of good during her time in office.

In reality, Sinema’s stances against popular Democratic legislation, such as raising the minimum wage, drew opposition from Democrats who saw her as betraying the party as well her constituents. Perhaps most memorably, she made a thumbs down gesture to vote against an amendment to add a minimum wage increase to President Biden’s coronavirus relief bill in 2021. At the time, she drew ire for what many thought was a misguided attempt to copy the late Senator John McCain, who made a similar gesture in 2017 to save the Affordable Care Act from Republicans.

Replace Sinema PAC, formed to defeat her in the 2024 election, released a statement after her announcement.

“We started this effort to Replace Sinema over two years ago to hold Sinema accountable for betraying the Arizonans who elected her. Sinema obstructed President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, got in the way of fundamental rights like abortion care and voting, and did the bidding of her wealthy donors who fund her luxury lifestyle. We succeeded in first pushing her out of the party – by making clear she couldn’t win a Democratic primary – and now we’ve also helped push her out of the Senate. Good. Arizonans deserve better. We now must put all of our efforts into helping elect Ruben Gallego, a pro-choice champion who will fight for Arizonans every day, over MAGA extremist Kari Lake. Game on.”

Sinema’s departure from the Senate ends a career full of betrayal of her own constituents, who believed they were electing a Democrat, as well as the rest of the country. In addition to blocking a minimum wage increase, she also famously helped reshape the Inflation Reduction Act for the worse, pressuring Democrats to remove proposed tax overhauls for the wealthy.

Even outside of the policy realm, she wasn’t much better. She was allegedly a very demanding boss, giving her staff a 37-page guide to working for her that included buying her groceries, fixing her internet, and even making sure her airline preferences were fulfilled. She reportedly kept up an active Facebook marketplace account mostly selling her exercise clothing and equipment. And then there’s that fact that she spent roughly $210,000 of her taxpayer-funded budget on private air travel, ironic considering that earlier in her career, she was once a member of the environmentally conscious Green Party.

What’s next for Sinema after her Senate term runs out this year? A lucrative career in lobbying to cap her six years as corporate America’s darling? A vanity presidential campaign from corporate-backed No Labels, whose donors also gave to her aborted Senate campaign? Regardless of where she goes, at least one person is sorry to see her go: noted senator’s daughter Meghan McCain.

This article has been updated.