Nikki Haley Gives Speech To Mostly Empty Seats As Campaign Flops

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Nikki Haley, who is allegedly running for president, appeared this week at the latest installment of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), giving a speech to a crowd that was very small with many empty seats.

Haley announced last month she was running for the Republican nomination for president ahead of the 2024 election, but she has been curiously resistant to the prospect of speaking in direct terms against Trump, even though that’s who she’s running against — and at this point, the only major candidate she’s facing! She has instead seemed more interested in discussing her beef with Biden, but she’s not running against Biden — not unless she beats Trump. Is she just angling to eventually become Trump’s pick for VP? At CPAC this week, a journalist snapped a photo of what, on examination, seems to be a main gathering place for the convention right in the middle of Haley’s speech — and it looks largely empty. Although only part of the hall is visible in journalist Alan Fisher’s shot, it looks like only about one-third of the hall’s front-most seats were actually filled.

Others who would be speaking at the event included Donald Trump Jr. and Trump himself, who’s been dismissive about Haley’s candidacy, about which he doesn’t sound particularly worried. Generally, Haley’s poll numbers have been in the single digits, behind both Trump and Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, who hasn’t announced a candidacy for president but is seen as a potential candidate. Biden has repeatedly led Haley in polls testing what voters’ support would be should they run against each other in the general election come 2024. Despite Trump’s predictable confidence, the incumbent president also leads Trump in some of the available polling, including from the pollster Cygnal.

Elsewhere at CPAC, Trump Jr. said in an interview for Newsmax that PNC Bank, a major financial services provider, had abruptly dumped MxM News, the news aggregator he founded. Trump Jr. didn’t initially provide a lot of details about what any claimed reasoning from the bank might have been. As an aggregator, Don Jr.’s platform was designed to collect other sources of information for easy reading rather than itself providing a site for original content.