Nikki Haley Makes Her Case to Keep Running

Well, that wasn’t what Donald Trump wanted to hear. On Tuesday Nikki Haley delivered a 30-minute address that many in the press suspected, and Trump World hoped, would announce the end of her campaign. Nope.

Her message: Mr. Trump will have to defeat her the old-fashioned way, at the ballot box. “We don’t anoint kings in this country," she said in Greenville, S.C., ahead of the state’s primary on Saturday. “We have elections. And Donald Trump, of all people, should know we don’t rig elections."

Mr. Trump and his allies have spent the last several weeks declaring him the GOP’s de facto nominee and insisting Ms. Haley is helping President Biden by refusing to acknowledge reality and drop out. But there’s a bigger reality Mr. Trump’s campaign hasn’t acknowledged, and Ms. Haley put it in plain terms: “The only candidate who’s helping Joe Biden is Donald Trump, because Trump is the only Republican Biden can beat."

National polls consistently have the two incumbents neck and neck, and that’s before Mr. Trump has had a chance to remind voters of why they dropped him in 2020: his erratic behavior and never-ending personal feuds. Those traits, as Ms. Haley pointed out, have intensified since Mr. Trump left office. “He’s completely distracted," she said. “And everything is about him. He’s so obsessed with his own demons from the past, he can’t focus on delivering the future Americans deserve."

Ms. Haley didn’t dwell on the multiple indictments and judgments pending against Mr. Trump. But whatever one thinks of those cases—these columns have criticized some as partisan lawfare and all of them as ill-advised—Mr. Trump is preoccupied by them and they could result in convictions.

Ms. Haley wisely disassociated herself from the Never