“The R.N.C. is now not the same R.N.C.,” Ms. Haley said. “Now it’s Trump’s daughter-in-law.”
The closest Ms. Haley came to explicitly disavowing the pledge was when she said, “I’ll make what decision I want to make.” But she quickly added: “That’s not something I’m thinking about. And I think that while y’all think about that, I’m looking at the fact that we had thousands of people in Virginia, we’re headed to North Carolina, we’re going to continue to go to Vermont and Maine and all these states to go and show people that there is a path forward.”
She did not hold back on criticizing Mr. Trump, saying, for example, that she did not want a president who “calls his opponents ‘vermin,’” as Mr. Trump has, echoing rhetoric used by Hitler and Mussolini. When asked whether she believed Mr. Trump “would follow the Constitution,” she said: “I don’t know. I mean, you always want to think someone will. But I don’t know.”
Ms. Haley, who lost a series of primary contests over the weekend, said that Mr. Trump had “condoned” and failed to “do anything to stop lawlessness” when his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but would not say directly whether she considered him responsible for the attack.
“When he had the opportunity to stop it, you have everybody from Fox News anchors to friends to family begging him to say something to get them to stop, including his vice president, and he was silent,” she said. She added, “Anytime there is lawlessness, and you condone lawlessness, and you don’t do anything to stop lawlessness, he’s going to have to answer for that.”
But when asked whether Mr. Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack — as Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said shortly after it happened — Ms. Haley said she wasn’t a lawyer and couldn’t make a legal judgment, even as Ms. Welker specified that she wasn’t asking for a legal judgment.
