Election Updates: Nikki Haley says she will vote for Trump. (2024)

Nikki Haley’s half-endorsem*nt of Donald Trump, after he insulted her husband and her marriage, recalls a similar situation in the 2016 campaign. Senator Ted Cruz, then running against Trump for the Republican nomination, denounced him in fiery exchanges for insulting tweets targeting Cruz’s wife, Heidi. Cruz held out on an endorsem*nt after dropping out, but by October was phone-banking for Trump in what ended up becoming an unflattering photo op.

In the room where Nikki Haley spoke today at the Hudson Institute, there were a few audible sighs of disappointment when she said she would vote for Donald Trump. Robert Schwartz, who heads the Haley Voters for Biden PAC, told me she had a future in Republican politics and her own personal and political reasons to maintain ties with her party. But he contended her voters had “entirely different calculations” on what is best for the country.

President Biden's campaign may have lost out on the chance to win Nikki Haley’s own vote but his team has already begun winning over some of her voters, releasing an ad last month that highlighted some of Donald Trump’s attacks on Haley.

The bigger question is what Nikki Haley’s statement means for her immediate political future. Saying she’ll vote for Donald Trump would be a minimum requirement for being considered as his running mate — a prospect that seems unlikely given what each has said about the other. But in politics there’s a long history of ambition eclipsing all.

Nikki Haley’s backhanded endorsem*nt of Donald Trump is not likely to have much impact on the swath of voters — about one-fifth of Republican primary voters — who have backed her so far. A good number of them were Biden voters in 2020, and plenty, like her, will vote for the Republican on the ballot in November, whoever it is.

Donald Trump, in an interview with a New York City radio station, again insisted that he believes New York, a deeply Democratic state, could be in play in November. “I do if we can have an honest election,” he said ahead of a campaign event on Thursday in the Bronx. Trump lost the state, a liberal stronghold, by large margins in 2016 and 2020.

After her speech at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, Nikki Haley is asked who she believed would do a better job as president. She tells the moderator she will vote for Donald Trump. She added: “Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him.”

In a fireside chat after her inaugural address at the Hudson Institute, where she is the new Walter P. Stern chairwoman, Nikki Haley said she ended her campaign with “gratitude.” She has since caught up on sleep, is back to running regularly, and has been spending time with her husband, Michael, who is back home from deployment. “I have no regrets,” she said. “We left it all in the field.”

In her first public address since suspending her Republican presidential bid, Nikki Haley kept to familiar territory in delivering a scathing foreign policy rebuke of President Biden and isolationist Republicans but made no mention of her chief primary opponent: Donald Trump.

President Biden on Wednesday officially reneged on a promise to visit Africa during his first term, telling the president of Kenya that he intended to visit the continent “in February, after I am re-elected.” Biden will host William Ruto, the Kenyan president, for a state visit on Thursday. For months, Biden’s aides have ducked questions about whether he would make good on his promise to visit Africa.

Abortion rights drove overwhelming majorities of Latino voters to the polls in special elections last year in Ohio and Virginia, where the issue played a central role. But to maximize turnout in 2024, the party must not ignore Latino voters’ worries about the economy and inflation, according to previously unreported data from the progressive groups Way to Win and the Valiente Action Fund.

Way to Win and Valiente Action Fund interviewed 800 Latino voters in Virginia and Ohio. In Virginia, 75 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans said abortion would be essential to their vote. In Ohio, 72 percent of all Latino participants voted in favor of a ballot measure codifying abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution. But in both states, the economy was the most important issue animating voters.

President Biden edges former President Donald J. Trump by a single point in a hypothetical head-to-head race, according to a new national poll from Quinnipiac University, which showed no clear leader. When third-party and independent candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were included in the poll, Biden’s lead was three points, also within the poll’s margin of error. Kennedy got 14 percent.

The top Democrat and Republican contenders for Michigan’s open Senate seat, declined to participate in a May 30 debate, prompting its cancellation, the Detroit Regional Chamber said. Mike Rogers, a former G.O.P. House member, said he would only attend if Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat currently in the House, did as well. She balked at debating without both him and Justin Amash, another Republican.

The Biden campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said that former President Donald J. Trump had opened the door to laws like the one passed in Louisiana on Tuesday that classifies two abortion drugs as “controlled dangerous substances.” “A vote for Trump is a vote to bring what’s happening in Louisiana nationwide,” Landrieu said. Abortion is one of the few issues where voters express more confidence in President Biden than Trump.

The slim chance that Donald J. Trump could choose Nikki Haley as his running mate has prompted plenty of chatter on the Washington co*cktail circuit. But for a measure of how detested she has become among his loyalists, consider that his campaign is raising money off his recent announcement that she is not being considered. “But I wish her well,” Trump says in a fund-raising appeal.

Elon Musk said Tuesday night that he would be willing to host a presidential debate in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate, could participate. Details, however, were in short supply. In response to a post on X in which Musk said Kennedy should be on stage at the CNN debate next month, Kennedy asked: “Will you host one?” Musk replied about 90 minutes later: “Sure."

The discovery of a suspicious package containing two vials of blood at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington on Wednesday morning prompted a heavy law enforcement response, the authorities said. Hazardous materials teams removed the contents and the incident remains under investigation, according to the U.S. Capitol Police.

Moms for Liberty, a conservative group known for opposing transgender rights and taking other hard-right positions on cultural issues, plans to spend $3 million this year on an ad campaign targeting voters in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The first products are anti-transgender billboards in Georgia.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans, announced $141 million in ad reservations for the fall across 37 media markets. The amount of money is higher than last cycle, but the number of targeted races is lower. “The map is undoubtedly small,” the group’s president, Dan Conston, said in a statement.

Haley says she will vote for Trump, in her first appearance since dropping out of the race.

But in a fireside chat afterward, the moderator, Peter Rough, asked Ms. Haley who she believed would do a better job in the White House. Ms. Haley paused before carefully continuing her answer. As a voter, she said, she would put her priorities behind a president who would have the “backs of our allies and hold our enemies to account,” secure the nation’s borders and curb the national debt.

“Trump has not been perfect on these policies. I’ve made that clear many, many times,” she said. “But Biden has been a catastrophe. So, I will be voting for Trump.” A few sighs were audible in the crowd as she spoke.

As Mr. Trump’s longest-standing rival in the 2024 primary contest, Ms. Haley carved out an important lane for herself as the voice for Republican and independent voters looking for an alternative to the former president. While she was included in recent chatter about Mr. Trump’s possible running mates, he recently all but ruled out the possibility of selecting Ms. Haley, who also is a former South Carolina governor.

Her decision on whether to endorse him could play a pivotal role in shaping the presidential contest. Ms. Haley, who was named the new Walter P. Stern chairwoman at the Hudson Institute, has built a formidable network of high-dollar donors and has a solid base of younger people, college-educated voters and independents that she has warned Mr. Trump he needs to win. But she and the former president grew increasingly bitter at the end of the primary.

In her chat after the speech, she also said Mr. Trump “would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him.”

Representatives for Mr. Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Biden campaign officials said Ms. Haley’s remarks would not sway the anti-Trump moderates and independents who reject the violence and division that Mr. Trump represents. Though Ms. Haley never embraced the anti-Trump label, many came to see her candidacy as a principled (even if futile) stand against Mr. Trump and his transformation of his party.

“Nothing has changed for the millions of Republican voters who continue to cast their ballots against Donald Trump in the primaries and care deeply about the future of our democracy,” Michael Tyler, the communications director for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement. “Only one candidate shares those values, and only one campaign is working hard every day to earn their support — and that’s President Biden’s.”

The Biden campaign has been working behind the scenes to reach out to high-profile Republicans and Haley voters. It is also planning to roll out a grass-roots group with dedicated staff workers to organize Republican voters in key battlegrounds.

Robert Schwartz, who heads the Haley Voters for Biden PAC, said Ms. Haley’s comments on Wednesday were not surprising. She has a future in Republican politics and her own personal, political and partisan reasons to maintain ties with those in her party, he added. But he contended her voters had “entirely different calculations” on what was best for the country.

“I am not going to sugarcoat it — it is bad news,” Mr. Schwartz said. “But it is something that we expected, and taking a step back, it is actually a pretty weak endorsem*nt.”

Ms. Haley echoed many of the signature themes from her campaign during her speech. She criticized Mr. Biden for his withdrawal from Afghanistan and what she described as his failure to take on China and Iran. She called his recent decision to withhold a shipment of bombs to Israel as “foolish.”

“Withholding them validates the totally false and destructive narrative that Israel is acting unjustly by defending herself,” she said.

But she did not do the same to Mr. Trump, whom she had described as “unhinged” and a dangerous agent of chaos throughout much of her campaign. Instead, she reserved her choice words for members of her own party, disparaging them for promoting an isolationist approach to Ukraine’s war with Russia.

“Just a few weeks before Biden threw Israel to the wolves, many Republicans in Congress tried to push Ukraine off a cliff,” she said, praising Speaker Mike Johnson for demonstrating “moral courage and a clear understanding of the stakes.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting.

WHAT WAS SAID

“BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME! It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

— Mr. Trump, in a fund-raising email

This is misleading.

Mr. Trump was referring to a document that was made public Tuesday in a court filing in the criminal case regarding his handling of classified materials.

The document, on Page 11 of an evidentiary exhibit, described the F.B.I.’s plans for its court-authorized search in August 2022, and included a standard statement from the Justice Department’s policy on the use of deadly force. The F.B.I. is an agency of the Justice Department.

That statement says deadly force is allowed “only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” It specifies that such force is not permissible to prevent a person from fleeing, to disable a moving vehicle or to stop someone who poses a threat only to themselves or to property.

The policy in the exhibit is nearly identical to the standard policy on the Justice Department’s website, with only minor wording changes that do not affect its meaning — for example, “fired” instead of “discharged” in reference to a firearm. That policy applies to every F.B.I. operation, and its inclusion in plans for the Mar-a-Lago search was ordinary.

“The F.B.I. followed standard protocol in this search, as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” the F.B.I. said in a statement. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken, and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, doubled down on Wednesday, claiming the F.B.I. had been forced “to put out a statement to make it sound like authorizing the use of deadly force at the home of the former president, who is protected by Secret Service, is perfectly normal.”

The language in the document, however, was a reiteration of department policy limiting force.

Mr. Trump repeated his claims in a similar post on his social media website on Tuesday. A court filing from Mr. Trump’s legal team also misrepresented the policy. It said the F.B.I.’s plans “stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary’” — omitting “only” before “when necessary.” It also omitted language explaining that such force is limited to cases involving an imminent threat of death or serious injury.

The F.B.I. conducted the search on a day when Mr. Trump was out of town and the club at Mar-a-Lago was closed. A former assistant F.B.I. director, Steven D’Antuono, testified to a House committee last June that, before the search, the bureau had communicated with the Secret Service “to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues,” and that everyone involved had agreed to avoid “a show of force.”

Michael Gold, Glenn Thrush and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

A Kennedy adviser leaves the campaign, citing a ‘hateful and divisive atmosphere.’

“After much reflection, I’ve decided to step away from the political theater,” that statement said. “The increasingly hateful and divisive atmosphere no longer aligns with my values.”

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Ms. Stanton King was a high-profile figure in the Kennedy campaign, appearing with Mr. Kennedy and Nicole Shanahan, his running mate, on the campaign trail and addressing crowds at rallies. In Ms. Shanahan’s debut campaign event in Houston this month, Ms. Stanton King spoke at length and introduced the candidate to the crowd, saying, “I don’t fall in love with a lot of people, but I fell in love with Nicole.”

She was one of many advisers, staff members and consultants for Mr. Kennedy who had previous ties with or were supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. Ms. Stanton King was pardoned by Mr. Trump in 2020 after serving six months of home confinement in 2007 for her role in a stolen-vehicle ring, and soon after ran as a Republican for a U.S. House seat in Atlanta.

An avowed adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory at the time of her House campaign, Ms. Stanton King later supported Mr. Trump’s claims of a rigged election after she lost her race in a landslide, eventually calling for a military coup to oust President Biden in early 2021. (She has since deleted her post calling for a coup.)

Ms. Stanton-King was also heavily involved in Georgia grass-roots Republican events, particularly as they related to Black voter outreach. During Herschel Walker’s unsuccessful Senate campaign in 2022, Ms. Stanton-King stirred some conflict when she participated in a campaign event for Mr. Walker that gave potential voters gasoline vouchers.

The Kennedy team has been waging an internal battle over the campaign’s abortion platform. Mr. Kennedy had previously said that he would not support government restrictions on abortion care, but reversed himself this month after a public pressure campaign from Ms. Shanahan and Ms. Stanton King, who is an anti-abortion activist and advocate for criminal justice reform.

In an interview with the podcaster Sage Steele that ran this month, Mr. Kennedy said he would not support government restrictions on abortion care, even if that would allow women to terminate their pregnancies after the point of viability — usually about 24 weeks.

“I don’t think it’s ever OK,” Mr. Kennedy said, adding “we have to leave it to the women rather than the state.”

That position appeared to come as a surprise to Ms. Shanahan, who has called for a national abortion ban at roughly 15 to 18 weeks. She had her own interview with Ms. Steele during which she said Mr. Kennedy “absolutely believes in limits on abortion, and we’ve talked about this.”

An impassioned debate then played out inside the campaign on the eve of Ms. Shanahan’s planned debut on the campaign trail at the event in Houston. Ms. Stanton King repeatedly attacked Mr. Kennedy for his position on social media, at one point suggesting that she was considering quitting the campaign entirely.

In Ms. Stanton King’s account, the dispute only ended after “a bunch of going back and forth with not only Bobby but also people on the campaign,” and after Mr. Kennedy called her and agreed to change his position. Mr. Kennedy did so a few hours later, saying in a social media post that he would now support “restrictions on abortion in the final months of pregnancy, just as Roe v. Wade did.”

Maya King contributed reporting.

Voters oust a progressive prosecutor in Portland.

But in the years since Mr. Schmidt’s election in 2020, voters in Portland have signaled an interest in cracking down on crime and homelessness. As businesses fled the city center, people reported feeling unsafe on the streets. Homicides and overdoses soared.

Mr. Vasquez called for a new approach, setting up a bitter campaign against his boss. He promised to take on lawless behavior and petty crimes, differentiating himself from Mr. Schmidt who had won four years ago with pledges to move away from focusing on low-level crimes.

Mr. Schmidt tried to highlight the progress seen in the last year, when car thefts dropped rapidly and homicides were coming down from record highs. He backed an effort to partially roll back Oregon’s drug decriminalization law.

Mr. Vasquez, an independent who previously was a registered Republican, is the latest public official in a West Coast city to be elected with a promise to be tougher on crime. In 2021, voters in Seattle elected a Republican as the city prosecutor after she vowed more action on low-level crimes. The next year, voters in San Francisco recalled the progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin.

The district attorney position in Portland is nonpartisan, and with only two candidates on the primary ballot Mr. Vasquez’s victory means he is set to take over the office next year.

Vials of blood sent to R.N.C. headquarters prompt lockdown.

The package also contained ice packs and a Korean-language Bible, according to Brianna Burch, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Capitol Police, who said that the incident remained under investigation.

The R.N.C. and Mr. Trump’s campaign did not immediately comment on the situation, which drew a heavy law enforcement response and played out just a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol.

At 7:45 a.m. Eastern time, officers responded to the 300 block of First Street, Southeast, after receiving a report about the suspicious package, the authorities said. Hazardous materials teams removed the contents of the package, and the lockdown order was lifted shortly before 10 a.m.

The authorities did not say how many people were inside the R.N.C.’s headquarters at the time.

Television news broadcasts showed the area blocked off by police vehicles and yellow tape.

It was not the first time that a startling discovery had been made at the R.N.C.’s office.

On Jan. 6, 2021, the day that the U.S. Capitol was attacked by Mr. Trump’s supporters, who were seeking to overturn his election defeat, a pipe bomb was discovered at the R.N.C.’s headquarters. A bomb squad destroyed the device.

That same day, another suspicious package forced the evacuation of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, which is also a few blocks from the Capitol.

Trump prosecutor wins in Georgia, McCarthy’s successor is set in California, and other election takeaways.

Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky and Oregon also held primary contests on Tuesday, with presidential primaries in Kentucky and Oregon yielding notable protest votes against President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.

Here are some takeaways.

Biden met significant resistance in the Kentucky primary, and a protest vote against him in Oregon faltered.

Nearly 30 percent of voters in the Democratic primary in Kentucky backed an option that wasn’t Mr. Biden, a notable underperformance for the president among Democrats in the state. The protest vote against Mr. Biden there was nearly double that against Mr. Trump, who won about 85 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. Turnout also plunged in the Democratic primary, with about 184,000 votes tallied, compared with the more than 537,000 recorded in 2020.

In Oregon, a write-in campaign in protest of Mr. Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza underperformed significantly, with less than 5 percent of all votes in the Democratic primary going to write-ins. In neighboring Washington State, the uncommitted ballot option got nearly 10 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in late March. Mr. Trump was unopposed in Oregon’s Republican primary.

Fani T. Willis, the top prosecutor for Trump’s Georgia criminal case, won her primary in a landslide.

The Democratic primary for district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., ended in a remarkable blowout. Fani Willis, who is prosecuting Mr. Trump and others over his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, crushed her opponent, Christian Wise Smith, winning with 87 percent of the vote.

Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing Mr. Trump’s case in Georgia, also won re-election with a yawning lead: 83 percent of the vote. He and Ms. Willis were considered the favorites in their respective races.

The result for Ms. Willis signaled confidence in her performance among Democrats after a romantic relationship with a lawyer she had hired to manage the prosecution came to light in January. Defense lawyers for Mr. Trump said that the relationship was a serious conflict of interest, and they had asked Judge McAfee to remove Ms. Willis from the case. The Georgia Court of Appeals will review Judge McAfee’s decision to let her remain on the case.

A progressive candidate in Oregon loses in a closely watched Democratic primary.

Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a progressive candidate for Oregon’s Fifth Congressional District, was defeated in the Democratic primary by Janelle Bynum, two years after narrowly losing to a Republican opponent for the swing seat in 2022. Ms. Bynum, whom Gov. Tina Kotek endorsed, will face Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who ran unopposed in the Republican primary, in what will be one of the most closely watched House races this year.

Mike Schmidt, the progressive district attorney of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, was trailing his challenger, Nathan Vasquez, a prosecutor in his own office.

Mr. Vasquez, who was previously registered as a Republican, blamed Mr. Schmidt for Portland’s recent problems with drugs and crime. Mr. Vasquez vowed to prosecute even petty crimes amid a rise in homicides, homelessness and overdose deaths during Mr. Schmidt’s tenure.

Mr. Schmidt, who had previously campaigned on making low-level crimes a lower priority in 2020, recently hardened his stance on drugs and shifted staff to prosecute more violent crime in response to voters’ concerns.

Doug Emhoff calls Trump a ‘known antisemite’ as Biden’s team steps up its attacks.

“The last person I’m going to take advice from as a Jewish person is a known antisemite who’s had dinner with antisemites, who said there was ‘good people on both sides’ after Charlottesville,” Mr. Emhoff says in the video, after he apparently watches a weeks-old video of Mr. Trump proclaiming that Jews who vote for Mr. Biden “have to have their head examined.”

Mr. Emhoff adds for emphasis, “He’s the last person I’m going to take advice from.”

The Biden campaign has been seeking to extend a news cycle that began this week when Mr. Trump posted, then later took down, a video on social media that included old-time newspaper headlines saying a victory by him in November would bring about a “unified Reich.” Mr. Biden, in a video released by his campaign, accused Mr. Trump of using “Hitler’s language.”

The Biden campaign and its surrogates have previously condemned Mr. Trump for using antisemitic language. Two weeks ago, a Biden campaign spokesman, Charles Lutvak, blasted Mr. Trump for employing “patronizing antisemitic shtick” after the former president said Jews who voted for Mr. Biden “should be ashamed of themselves.”

Mr. Trump has long flirted with antisemitic language and imagery, and shown support for far-right backers who are openly antisemitic.

In 2016, his campaign posted and then deleted an image of Hillary Clinton, then his general-election rival, with a pile of cash and the words “most corrupt candidate ever” inside a Star of David. Once in office, he infamously declared that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the 2017 rally involving neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. Days after announcing his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists.

Yet it is Mr. Biden who has lately found himself in a political vise involving American Jews. His support for Israel’s government after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, which killed more than 1,200 people, has led to fierce criticism from Arab and Muslim Americans, progressives and other Democrats as the reported death toll in Gaza has swelled to more than 34,000 Palestinians. More recently, he has been called anti-Israel for announcing that he would pause the shipment of some weapons to the country.

Meanwhile, American college campuses were racked this spring with encampments and demonstrations against the war in Gaza, and Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have been dogged for months by protests over the conflict. On Tuesday, as Ms. Harris spoke to union members at a Philadelphia convention center, about three dozen people in the back of the event chanted pro-Palestinian slogans and held up signs that said “workers rise up” and “free Palestine.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, did not directly respond to Mr. Emhoff’s remarks in the Tuesday video. Instead, he sought to tie the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza to Mr. Biden while painting opposition to the war as antisemitic.

“Joe Biden is responsible for all this antisemitic hate on campuses across the country,” Mr. Cheung said. “Whereas there has been no bigger friend to Israel and the Jewish people than President Trump, and his strong record reflects that.”

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting from Philadelphia.

Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, returns to the fold for the Republican convention.

The hiring was first reported by National Review, and Chris LaCivita, a top official in the Trump campaign, told the conservative outlet that Mr. Lewandowski was “very helpful to me, and he’s helpful to the R.N.C., and he’s helpful to the president.”

This month, Paul Manafort, who replaced Mr. Lewandowski as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, stepped down from a similar role advising the nominating convention, saying that “the media wants to use me as a distraction to try and harm President Trump and his campaign.” Mr. Manafort was convicted of a range of financial crimes and conspiracy to obstruct justice and spent nearly two years in prison before Mr. Trump pardoned him in December 2020.

Mr. Lewandowski was the campaign manager for Mr. Trump when he first jumped into the presidential race in June 2015. Mr. Trump fired him in June 2016 at the urging of allies and his adult children as Mr. Lewandowski faced negative headlines that had overshadowed his boss, including being arrested and charged with misdemeanor battery — a charge later dropped — after he was accused of grabbing a reporter as she approached Mr. Trump. The next year, a pop singer accused Mr. Lewandowski of slapping her twice on the buttocks at a party in Washington.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee highlighted the allegations against Mr. Lewandowski and said the Trump campaign was “scraping the bottom of the MAGA barrel” by hiring him.

Mr. Lewandowski had considered running for a Senate seat in 2020 in New Hampshire, but ultimately backed out of the race.