CNN
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Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, in her speech to the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, cheered America’s “incredible ability to self-correct.”
Haley, so recently a political rival and fierce critic of former President Donald Trump, might have been talking about herself.
On the second night of the convention in Milwaukee, less than 24 hours after a top union leader denounced corporate America in the same hall, Haley executed a stark about-face, pledging her support to Trump and asking others who had expressed similar concerns about his potential return to power to consider the alternative: President Joe Biden. Other speakers, such as Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump and grief-stricken parents telling their own families’ agonizing stories, offered more poignant messages as the GOP and Trump’s campaign tried again to sand off the former president’s rough edges.
“I will start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement. Period,” Haley said at the beginning of her speech – dispelling any remaining suggestions to the contrary and, in the moment, warming up a crowd that had greeted her coolly.
Haley’s speech, delivered a night after Trump was formally nominated, firmly closed the door on whatever remains of the dissent that hung over parts of the 2024 GOP primary campaign. But if she was trying to thread a needle, backing Trump the candidate without endorsing all his ideas, she was the exception.
The other speakers were unanimously loyal to the former president, describing him as a self-sacrificial leader who, while in office, took America to its greatest heights only to see his work undone by Biden’s feckless presidency. Former foes lined up to sing Trump’s praises, admit the error of their ways and tell voters that the halcyon days of Trump’s first term would seem mild compared with the promise of another.
Here are five takeaways from the second night of the Republican convention:
Haley took the stage, at the invitation of Trump, to a mix of cheers and jeers. She quickly set about to win over the faithful.
First, she offered a full endorsement and then, nodding to their occasionally nasty, if one-sided, primary fight, issued a “simple” message.
“You don’t have agree with Donald Trump 100% of the time to vote for him,” Haley said. “Take it from me.”
In the 2024 primary, Haley consistently scored above 20% among GOP voters – and won two contests – underscoring Trump’s lingering issues with moderate, suburban Republicans. On Tuesday, Haley said she was speaking to them – the fence-sitters.
“For the sake of our nation, we have to go with Donald Trump,” Haley said, a little before telling delegates, “I’m here tonight because we have a country to save.”
She also took repeated jabs at Vice President Kamala Harris, a crowd-pleasing venture, and spoke, with gusto, about Trump’s foreign policy chops and cheered his worldview.
Haley would know, of course, having served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations for two years.
Her takeaway from that time? “He appreciated advice and input,” she said Tuesday.
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It was not only Haley who used the occasion to ask for a kind of forgiveness from Trump and the Republican base.
Other onetime rivals, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose primary campaign fizzled out shortly after voting began, also kissed Trump’s ring. They includedVivek Ramaswamy, former Housing and Urban Development secretary Ben Carson, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (whose 2016 run opposing Trump was endorsed by Haley) and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
“Donald Trump is the president who will actually unite this country,” Ramaswamy said.
Cruz, who told a similar audience to “vote your conscience” at the 2016 RNC, focused most of his remarks on the “literal invasion” of undocumented migrants at the southern border and, as he put it, on speaking up for young women who had been victimized by those immigrants.
DeSantis also applauded Trump, but mostly used his time to warn against reelecting Biden, whom he described as a “tool for a leftist agenda.”
“America,” the Florida governor insisted, “cannot afford four more years of a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ presidency.”
Christie and the ‘unity’ brigade vs. RNC speakers
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie long ago evolved from a top Trump ally to one of the former president’s most vocal Republican critics.
On Tuesday, just as a night of RNC speeches filled with calls for unity got underway, he dropped a bombshell op-ed in The New York Times, calling Trump’s early attempts to “rein in some of the worst rhetorical impulses” in their party “less than promising.”
“It is not enough for this to be only a momentary call for unity,” Christie wrote. “This change has to go beyond this week, next month and the November elections to be a real transformational shift. Otherwise, all we are left with is just another fleeting political moment.”
Others, on the convention floor and outside the venue, have preached unity and rapprochement. Not just within the Republican Party, they insisted, but across the board, among an increasingly sick and angry body politic. The heinous attempt on Trump’s life this past weekend in Pennsylvania, Republicans agreed, meant it was time for everyone to turn down the temperature.
That memo reached many of the night’s speakers – but not all.
Kari Lake, the hard-line conservative candidate for Senate in Arizona, falsely claimed that her Democratic opponent, Rep. Ruben Gallego, “voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.” She also attacked the media, per usual, for lying “about everything.”
Republican Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate here in Wisconsin, embraced a similar theme, accusing the media of “dividing us.”
“The bottom line to why we are here,” said West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, another Senate candidate, “the bottom line to every single thing that’s going on in this great country today is one thing: We become totally unhinged if Donald Trump is not elected in November.”
CNN fact-checks speeches on day two of the RNC
Down-ballot candidates and leaders make their cases
Several Republican candidates in key House and Senate races made their own cases Tuesday night — with a range of approaches, from Lake’s combative words to Pennsylvania Senate contender Dave McCormick’s call for unity.
House Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise, in a battle to keep his party’s narrow majority, used six words, over and over, to make his point: “President Trump and the Republican majority …” None of what he said after, Scalise implied, would matter if the first two parts weren’t secured.
Lake began her speech by calling out what she called “the fake news” and “disastrous Democrat policies.”
Hovde followed up Lake by continuing to blame news organizations for national divisions, saying that the media has to “stop dividing us.”
“We need to heal this country from the division that the left has brought,” he said in his speech.
McCormick, meanwhile, talked of being in the front row Saturday at Trump’s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally, where a gunman attempted to assassinate the former president.
In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins afterward, McCormick said Americans need to “make sure that we’re not talking in ways that dehumanizes people and ultimately contributes to an environment where violence is going to happen.”
Collins then asked about Lake’s comments.
“I’m only worried about myself. I wasn’t watching anybody else,” McCormick said.
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Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the national party, closed out the festivities with a tribute to the nominee and the makings of an olive branch to Trump-curious Democrats and independents.
“You didn’t have to love everything he tweeted,” she said of the former president, “but you cannot deny you were better off when Donald Trump was in office.”
Her address was also a reprise of sorts of the 2016 GOP convention, when Trump’s children all gave speeches attesting to their father’s good humor and self-sacrifice. She accused Democrats of trying to fear-monger about a second Trump term, an implicit reference to concerns over the Heritage Foundation-led “Project 2025” manifesto.
And she spoke, emotionally, about the attempt on her father-in-law’s life this past weekend. The scene had emotionally scarred her and her children, Lara Trump said, but also brought out the best in America, which came together in horror over the shooting.
“Maybe you got to see a side of Donald Trump on Saturday,” she said of his triumphal response to the would-be assassin’s near-miss, “that you didn’t know existed until you saw it with your own eyes.”
“He is a lion,” she said. “He is bold, he is strong, he is fearless – and he is exactly what this country needs right now.”