Nikki Haley lost Iowa. Then she lost New Hampshire. Now, some of the biggest donors in the Republican Party — a Trump-resistant donor class that has fueled her candidacy for months — are at least opening the door to former President Donald Trump.
A network of some of the country’s wealthiest Republican donors gathered this week at a Florida winter meeting held by the American Opportunity Alliance and heard from top aides to Trump and Haley. The gathering Monday and Tuesday was one of the first significant steps in the reluctant drag back to the reality of Trump for some of these donors, after aides to Trump received no such invitation to the group’s fall retreat.
Haley has a series of fundraisers in the coming days, and had one in New York City on Tuesday night. Money will not be an obstacle for her candidacy. But privately, some of the party’s major donors, including some who are supporting Haley, say they are ready for the contest to come to an end, in order to focus on President Joe Biden, and concede that Haley has little chance of overtaking Trump absent some unforeseen event.
At the American Opportunity Alliance retreat, Haley had far more backers than Trump did. Kenneth Griffin, a billionaire hedge-fund executive and major Republican donor who attended the retreat, gave $5 million to her super political action committee in January, according to a person close to him.
Before Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida dropped out of the race, he and his allies had anticipated support from Griffin because the investor had given generously to him in the past. But Griffin was disappointed by what he saw as an incompetent campaign coupled with profound policy mistakes, such as DeSantis’ description of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute,” according to several people familiar with his thinking.
Griffin had been holding out for a younger candidate who could challenge Trump, and it took him months to decide to support Haley. He praised Haley in a statement to reporters, saying that “America would be well served by someone with her foreign policy credentials and policy priorities in the White House.”
But speaking at an event earlier Tuesday, Griffin admitted that her path was “narrower” than it was two months ago, before Trump won Iowa and New Hampshire. The $5 million he contributed to Haley’s super PAC, while a significant sum by any normal accounting, is a relatively modest donation for Griffin. In 2022, he spent $50 million trying to defeat Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat.
Another donor, Las Vegas developer Robert Bigelow, is not part of the AOA network but had supported DeSantis with a $20 million donation to his super PAC. This week, he said he was giving the same amount to Trump.
Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokesperson for the Haley campaign, said: “No one said this would be easy, but we’re continuing to run a smart campaign that will ensure Republicans don’t keep losing. Nikki is the only thing standing in the way of a Trump-Biden rematch that 70% of Americans don’t want.”
Susie Wiles, a top adviser to Trump’s campaign, told the AOA gathering at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach, Florida, a simple story, with the help of charts, that depicted Trump as the inevitable Republican nominee. She described to the donors how he would win in the fall and said the campaign would welcome support from the party’s top donors, according to three people familiar with the event.
Wiles’ invitation to the AOA event was the first time the group, which holds two meetings a year, had hosted a representative from the Trump camp in the 2024 primary cycle. At their fall meeting last year in Dallas, only advisers to Haley, DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina were invited. Both DeSantis and Scott have since dropped out of the presidential race.
Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, gave at the AOA meeting what two people described as an impassioned pitch, calling her candidate an alternative to a chaotic and unpopular presidential nominee who could cause a domino effect of House and Senate losses for the party in November.
Ankney laid out what she portrayed as damning facts about the Trump candidacy. Her litany included the $83.3 million Trump was ordered to pay last week in a defamation case filed by writer E. Jean Carroll, whom a previous jury found he had sexually abused, according to the people familiar with her remarks.
Ankney acknowledged that Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, faced an uphill battle to defeat Trump. But she insisted that Haley would stay in the race as long as she had money and momentum, the people said.
The winter meeting of the group — founded a decade ago by wealthy investors, including Paul Singer and Griffin, both hedge fund magnates — came at a critical juncture in the Republican primary race. Trump, fresh off decisive victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, hopes to crush Haley in her home state of South Carolina in the primary Feb. 24, dealing her candidacy a most likely fatal blow.
For the Trump team, which is simultaneously battling the four criminal indictments Trump was charged with in 2023, spending money against Haley through the month of February, weeks before one of the trials may begin, is an unwelcome proposition.
This week’s event, as several people described it, was far less confrontational than the last AOA meeting. At that meeting, the DeSantis team in particular faced questions that were borderline hostile, according to people present.
One ally of Haley, speaking anonymously because the person was not authorized to discuss the event publicly, praised Wiles for showing up to face what would be a skeptical audience.
“The bridge has never been burned,” said a senior Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, when asked in an interview about the Trump campaign’s attitude toward major Republican donors including Singer and Griffin, who have resisted Trump.
“The bridge is there,” LaCivita added. “It’s up to them whether they want to cross it. These are all smart people. They know there’s no pathway to victory, no matter what Nikki and Co. dream up.”