Nikki Haley, Coward
The time for choosing has passed.
Nikki Haley ended her mostly theoretical presidential run on Wednesday, despite scoring an upset Super Tuesday victory over Donald Trump in Vermont. Unfortunately, there were more than a dozen other contests that day and she lost them all, including California and Texas, which can each fit several Vermonts.
“The time has now come to suspend my campaign,” Haley announced during remarks in South Carolina — another primary state she lost even though she gets her mail there. “I said I wanted Americans to have their voices heard. I have done that. I have no regrets.”
You’d think she’d at least regret losing the Republican primary. If she just wanted to travel the country and almost freeze to death in Iowa and New Hampshire, there are easier ways than running for president.
Some folks are eager to give Haley all the cookies for not immediately endorsing Trump, but at no point during her remarks did she rule out eventually selling her soul to MAGA.
“I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee, but on this question, as she did on so many others, Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said, ‘Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind.’”
During a 1995 interview, Thatcher quoted her father, who’d once said, “Never do things just because other people do them. You make up your mind what you want to do, and let the crowd follow you.” Haley’s kidding herself if she believes she’s not following the crowd right now, especially when she hedges her bets on supporting a rapist. She’s probably already made up her mind whether Trump is fit to serve as commander-in-chief. It’s hardly a moral conundrum. All she’s really considering now is how she can justify her inevitable endorsement speech at the Republican National Convention this summer.
Haley’s choice
“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party who did not support him, and I hope he does,” she said. “This is now his time for choosing.”
Haley doesn’t mention that Trump is facing 91 felony charges across four different jurisdictions. He was also ordered to pay $84 million in damages for defaming the woman he sexually assaulted and was smacked with a $464 million judgment for business fraud. Nonetheless, she remains hopeful that he’ll unify the Republican Party under a big tent filled with insurrectionists, criminal conspirators, and people who should definitely have regrets.
Trump declared on Super Tuesday, “We want to have unity and we’re going to have unity and it’s going to happen very quickly.” Like any fascist, he defines “unity” as total submission to his will.
You might’ve noticed that Haley referenced that other pre-MAGA conservative idol Ronald Reagan. “A Time For Choosing” is the 1964 speech Reagan gave in support of Republican nominee (and Civil Rights Act opponent) Barry Goldwater.
“You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right,” Reagan said. “There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”
“The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people,” he continued. “And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.”
Reagan acknowledged in his speech that he was once a Democrat but “I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines.” It wasn’t a coincidence that he left the Democratic Party around the same time as Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats (my least favorite ska band). The current Republican Party publicly rejected Haley, even in her home state, but she nonetheless maintains her party loyalty. She struggles to make the choice Reagan did when he left the Democratic Party in 1962. “I myself have been a life long Dem. but no longer,” he wrote to a colleague. He’d campaigned in 1960 as a “Democrat for Nixon” but in this letter, he advised cutting ties completely and joining the Republican Party “and by our very numbers force that party to be the organ for Economic conservatism.” Reagan would ultimately succeed. Goldwater lost the 1964 election in a rout, but Reagan’s “Time For Choosing” speech launched his political career. When Reagan was elected president in 1980, conservative columnist George Will would suggest that his victory vindicated Goldwater’s failed candidacy.
Donald Trump will never change, so the true choice remains Haley’s. She’s called out Trump and MAGA for their isolationism, petty cruelty, and reckless spending. Republican voters didn’t care, because it’s fully the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Kari Lake.
“Our world is on fire because of America’s retreat,” Haley warned during her farewell address. “Standing by our allies in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is a moral imperative. But it’s also more than that. If we retreat further, there will be more war, not less.”
She can repeat the GOP talking points about Joe Biden’s “weakness,” but deep down she knows that it’s her party that’s retreated from the world stage while enabling Vladimir Putin. Another four years of Biden — no matter how she feels about his domestic agenda — is objectively preferable to Trump’s chaos.
Reagan famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left him. Haley can’t really echo these sentiments because she shares so many policy positions with MAGA, especially regarding race, gender identity, and reproductive freedom. That matters more to her than a rational foreign policy. It’s why she’ll eventually find common cause with Kari Lake before she ever does with Kamala Harris, who would never abandon Ukraine to Putin.
Maybe Haley thinks she can follow Reagan’s lead without actually leading. She’ll just wait it out while MAGA implodes. Such callow opportunism will only ensure she’s a footnote in history. Wednesday was Haley’s time for choosing and she chose power. If she can’t wield it directly in the Oval Office, she’ll settle for proximity to power. A conservative-in-exile podcast and an Atlantic column just isn’t enough.
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I'm sure Haley couldn't point out a single instance where Trump tried to reach out and appeal to voters who were not in his cult. (If she wants to consider his "outreach" to black people, sheesh...) We all know his "earning" of her endorsement would look like this:
Haley: What do you have to say to me and the millions of Republicans who are not yet ready to support you?
Trump: Go fuck yourselves.
Haley: Ok, good enough for me! Can I get that ambassadorship to Upper Volta?
Had she been a forceful voice against MAGA and Trumpism, she'd have still lost, but she'd have likely scored more delegates, convinced a LOT more non-Republicans to cross and vote for her in primaries (perhaps winning more than just Vermont) and set herself up as a leader in an eventual post-Trump GOP. Instead, she just comes across as a limp noodle, not really knowing what she is for or against.
““It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party who did not support him, and I hope he does,” she said. “This is now his time for choosing.”“ - “I hope he does,” should be written on her fucking tombstone. That’s her endorsement without “endorsing”. What, exactly, does she think that overflowing sack of rancid horse manure is going to do to appeal to voters, with their stubbornly functional senses and prefrontal cortex, who have already soundly rejected him? I refuse to accept that any Republican who refuses to publicly denounce that rapidly decompensating and decomposing traitor for the vile puddle of sludge that he is is doing so for “the good of the country” or “the will of the people” or whatever lies they tell themselves so they can sleep at night. And since that is most of them, they can all fuck right off. Haley most of all. She was the last person standing in the R primary and could have made a decision to call him out for being a treasonous hateful criminal fuck who insulted her husband. (Insulting the spouses of his opponents is a trademark of his. Perhaps because all of his have hated him before he buries them on a golf course.) I wouldn’t dare to presume she’d go so far as to endorse Biden because heaven forbid, the American law of political tribalism won’t allow that. But she could have spoken the truth, or a reasonably facsimile of. Maybe it would destroy her political future in the treason party but so fucking what? If Shitstain gets in again he’ll destroy the country. It’s a more than reasonable risk. But nope, she’s a coward, and an opportunist, and a liar who claims, with a straight face, that decent, competent empathetic Joe Biden is somehow “more dangerous”. I think “more dangerous” is just code for Democrat. She’s no better than all the rest of them and she deserves to lose.