(The Hill) — Home Depot co-founder and billionaire Ken Langone put his support behind GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley on Friday, calling her approach to the 2024 election “smart.”
“I think she’s just what we need right now. I think her approach is smart. I think she’s clarified herself on some issues which is very important,” Langone, who is seen as a GOP megadonor, said in an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto. “And more importantly, I think the American people need this kind of leadership, statesman-like, elegant.”
“When you think of where we’ve been in the last six or seven or eight years, it’s not good, Neil. It’s not good at all,” he added.
The backing from Langone, who endorsed former President Trump in his 2016 White House campaign, comes after Haley secured an endorsement from another top donor: the Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity Action. The organization announced their support late last month, marking the first time a deep-pocketed group has endorsed a GOP candidate in a presidential primary.
“She has what it takes to lead a policy agenda to take on our nation’s biggest challenges and help ensure our country’s best days are ahead,” the group said at the time.
In Friday’s interview, Langone said he couldn’t support Florida Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis because his “numbers aren’t moving.”
Langone added that he believes Trump’s time had “come and gone,” while pointing to the last few months of his tenure in the White House, as reasons why he wouldn’t back the former president.
“What Trump put this country through for the last three months of his presidency was disgraceful. I’m sorry. And I think, frankly, that to me, ruined his chances to succeed himself at some point,” he told Cavuto. “So, you know, I think what happened on January 6th, all I had to say was, ‘please go home.’ You made known your feelings. Now go home.”
“He sat in a room and watched it for three hours, did nothing about it. So America is better than that,” Langone added. “America deserves […] better than that.”
Haley’s endorsements have given her a leg up on DeSantis, who was long seen as Trump’s biggest rival in the race. But, despite her best efforts and donors, skepticism remains over whether she can truly overtake Trump, who is in the lead by double digits in national polling.
Still, candidates are rushing to bring in support as the Iowa caucuses, the first real test for the candidates, inches closer. The voting will begin on Jan. 15.
The former president mocked Haley for the boost she gained from AFP’s endorsement, while calling it a “minor hit” for DeSantis.
“I was never in the running because I’m all about Making America, not the outside World, Great Again! These losers have fought me from 2016 to the present,” he wrote on Truth Social following the news. “They are bad for our Country, and so is a very weak and ineffective Birdbrain, who still says that ‘President Trump was a GREAT President, I will never run against him.’”
“She’s down 50 Points, she better start running FAST!” the former president added.