Nikki Haley would not pre-emptively pardon Donald Trump for crimes committed as president, saying no one was above the law and legal processes should play out. But she would pardon him anyway after any conviction, she added.
“I think everything needs to play out,” the South Carolina governor turned Republican presidential hopeful said on Thursday at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire, next week the second state to vote in the GOP primary.
“I think it’s important that happens. And I honestly think President Trump would want that to happen. If he wants to defend himself and prove that he has been treated … the wrong way, or whether it’s political, I think he would want to fight for that.
“You only want to talk about a pardon after someone has been convicted.”
The first former president ever indicted, Trump faces 91 criminal charges, concerning election subversion (four federal, 13 state), retention of classified information (40, federal) and hush-money payments (34, state). He also faces attempts to keep him off the ballot in multiple states, one headed for the supreme court and civil suits involving his businesses and a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.
Nonetheless, Trump leads Haley and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, by vast margins and scored a crushing win in Iowa this week. Haley finished third. But as Trump’s closest challenger in New Hampshire – if 17 points down in a new Suffolk University poll – and with DeSantis’s campaign widely seen to be on life support, she is seeking to portray a two-person race.
Two New Hampshire debates were scrapped after Haley said she would not take part. Trump has refused to debate at all and while racking up endorsements and toying with running mate picks is reportedly pressuring his rivals to quit, pursuing what Vanity Fair called “a carrot-and-stick strategy”, switching attacks and praise.
Trump is also making headlines of his own. Early on Thursday, in an all-capitals social media rant, he claimed “complete and total immunity” from prosecution for actions while in power. He repeated the claim on Fox News, also saying he was “sure the supreme court”, to which he appointed three rightwingers, “is going to say, ‘We’re not going to take the vote away from the people’” in the ballot access case.
Trump’s immunity claim, presented in his federal election subversion case and with an appeal ruling due, has been rubbished by historians and legal observers. Haley’s CNN host, Jake Tapper, asked what she made of it.
Haley said: “No. I mean, it should be common sense, right? Common sense. Obviously, if a president is doing something and … whether it’s terrorist threats or something like that, and people die, that’s one thing. But do you get just total freedom to do whatever you want? No.”
Tapper asked if Haley would follow Gerald Ford’s treatment of Richard Nixon after Watergate and pre-emptively pardon Trump. Haley said she would not, but she said she would pardon Trump after any conviction because “the last thing we need is an 80-year-old president” – Trump is 77 – “sitting in jail, because that’s just going to further divide our country”.
“This is no longer about whether he’s innocent or guilty. This is about … how do we bring the country back together? And I am determined to make sure all of this division, all of this chaos goes away. And I think a pardon for him would make all of that go away, and I think it would be healing for the country.”
Haley’s own efforts to address issues which have long divided her country continue to generate headlines. In New Hampshire, the candidate who failed to say slavery caused the civil war was asked about her claim that the US, founded on slavery and the displacement of Indigenous Americans, is not a racist country.
Haley, whose parents are from India, said she grew up
“a brown girl … in a small rural town. We had plenty of racism that we had to deal with. But my parents never said we lived in a racist country. And I’m so thankful they didn’t. Because for every brown and Black child out there, if you tell them they live or were born in a racist country, you’re immediately telling them they don’t have a chance.”
Haley trumpeted her achievements, as “the first female minority governor in history” and UN ambassador and added: “When you look, [the Declaration of Independence] said, ‘All men are created equal.’ I think the intent was to do the right thing. Now, did they have to go fix it along the way? Yes. But I don’t think the intent was ever that we were going to be a racist country. The intent was everybody was going to be created equally.
“And as we went through time, they fixed the things that were not ‘all men are created equal’. They made sure women became equal too. All of these things happened over time.”
