Nikki Haley Predictably Goes Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley Predictably Goes Nikki Haley
Don't bother looking for my shocked face.
Nikki Haley was the great girl boss hope. So many (mostly white) Democrats supported her campaign to become the less psychotic but still terrible Republican nominee. They loved when Haley smashed a rhetorical grapefruit in Vivek Ramaswamy’s face during the Republican primary debates. They applauded when Haley got feisty toward the end of her candidacy and “spoke truth to power” about Donald Trump. They donated money to her doomed campaign and provided crossover votes to her in the primaries. Saturday Night Live even invited her to share a stage with performers whose human rights she doesn’t recognize.
Well, she screwed you all but good. Haley announced Wednesday during remarks at the right-wing Hudson Institute that she’s voting for Trump, who she’s previously said was “totally unhinged” and “not qualified to be president, period.” I won’t bother singing the “I Told You So Chorus.” Although, this was inevitable and I warned you about it repeatedly.
Haley must have some pretty damn good reasons for her curious decision. (Watch below to see a woman sell her soul in real time.)
“As a voter, I put my priorities on a president who’s going to have the backs of our allies and hold our enemies to account, who would secure the border, no more excuses,” she said. “A president who would support capitalism and freedom, a president who understands we need less debt not more debt.”
You might think that Haley is describing President Joe Biden, who actively supports our allies instead of abandoning them like Trump to his dictator crushes. Instead, she said, “Trump has not been perfect on these policies — I’ve made that clear, many, many times.”
When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in February from Putin-related natural causes, Trump didn’t condemn his BFF. Haley said at the time, “Haley has said, “Anybody that can’t call out a dictator, that’s a problem. . . . [Putin’s] emboldened by Trump because Trump is not willing to stand up for our allies.”
“[Trump] said that he would stand with Putin and encourage him to invade our allies,” she said a few weeks later. “Trump would side with a dictator who kills his political opponents ... Trump is going to side with a madman who’s made no bones about the fact he wants to destroy America.”
She didn’t accuse Trump of mere imperfection. She specifically called out his anti-democratic, dictator-humping positions. Nonetheless, she insists she has no choice but to support the confirmed rapist because “Biden has been a catastrophe. So, I will be voting for Trump.”
Haley the liar
In reality, Haley’s foreign policy positions are more aligned with Biden and mainstream Democrats than they are with the MAGA-fied GOP. It’s why Marjorie Taylor Greene described her as “Bush in heels” and why the Trump campaign called her a “warmonger.” Yes, she attacked trans women and supports a federal abortion ban, but what’s especially galling is that she won’t admit that’s the sole reason to prefer Trump to Biden. Instead, she attacks Biden from a “normal Republican” position, which of course requires an absurd degree of lying.
“Look at what Biden has done in Ukraine,” she posted Wednesday on social media. “He did nothing to deter the invasion. He assumed Ukraine would fall within days. While the Ukrainians have proven to be amazing fighters, Biden refuses to help them win. He gives them just enough to survive, while Russian missiles and tanks grind their country to dust.”
Over here in our fact-based reality, Biden has steadfastly defended Ukraine, not just from Russia but from the Kremlin assets posing as Republican politicians who’d surrender the nation to Putin. It was Haley’s party who delayed vital Ukraine aid for months and it was Trump’s stooges who promoted an isolationist position that would let a mad dictator romp through Europe unchecked. That rarely goes well.
This is precisely what I said would happen when Haley endorsed Trump after a contentious primary where she stated in great detail how unfit he was for office. She’d justify her support by insisting that Biden and Kamala Harris in particular are worse, and the knife would cut deeper because Democrats had spent months elevating Haley as a sensible voice, a rational Republican who was nothing like Greene.
However, Haley is neither sensible nor rational. When she ended her campaign in March, she said, “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. This is now his time for choosing.” Trump did nothing of the sort. (Biden, who’s normal, made more overt appeals to her voters.) Since he clinched the nomination, Trump’s only become more hateful and repulsive. Yet, she remains hopeful that Trump will magically become another person.
“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. And I genuinely hope he does that,” she said Wednesday.
While I’m certain the overwhelming majority of Nikki Haley voters in the Haley household are really into Nikki Haley, the evidence is clear that most Haley voters in the primary were anti-Trump not pro-Haley. It was a coalition of independents, Democrats, and the dwindling number of Republicans who still support democracy. They consider another Trump presidency an extinction-level event for America. Trump can’t “reach out” to those voters. Their integrity doesn’t come as cheap as Haley’s.
What was the point of her campaign?
Biden was always a Democrat, and Trump was always a Republican. That situation was never going to change, so if Haley was going to prioritize her party over the republic itself, she could’ve saved a lot of time and just endorsed Trump early. Mark Sanford, Haley’s predecessor as South Carolina governor, told CNN’s Abby Phillips that he thinks Haley is “absolutely putting ambition first.”
Sanford suggested that Haley wants to remain “relevant in 2028,” and as former Republican Joe Walsh posted on social media, “[Haley] doesn’t want to give up her career as a Republican. Period. And take it from me, that’s a tough thing to give up. It’s why damn near every Republican these past 8 years has done the same thing Nikki just did.”
Yet, those facts were cemented when Haley launched her campaign. If she always intended to sell out, she should’ve done so much earlier, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when it was clear that the MAGA cult didn’t want a new leader. DeSantis dropped out after coming in a distant second in the Iowa caucuses. Haley was third, but she stayed in the race, even when her former allies, including fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott, endorsed Trump. She lost her home state, all the while further enraging Trump and his supporters. Democrats enjoyed watching her poke the bear, but it’s not as if we don’t have actual Biden/Harris supporters who can remind everyone that Trump is trash. Haley had no special insights. She’ll now seek to swing those suburban white ladies back to Trump. The upside is, as David Frum observes, her Trump endorsement “won’t raise their opinion of him; it will only lower their opinion of her.”
Before she was Rubio-ed in South Carolina, Haley insisted she was in the race to “save America,” presumably from Trump not just Biden.
“Many of the same politicians publicly embrace Trump, privately dread him,” she said in what is now known as her Ironic Foreshadowing Speech. “They know what a disaster he's been and will continue to be. They are just too afraid to say it out loud. I'm not afraid to say the hard truth out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring.”
She did in fact kiss the ring. So far, it’s earned her nothing. Trump hasn’t thanked her. He hasn’t even bothered to rub her nose in her submission, as he did former Attorney General Bill Barr. Meanwhile, Rep. Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body ranted Wednesday afternoon:
Desperate Neocon Nikki Haley finally endorsed Pres Trump today.
She is doing everything she can to weasel her way into Trump’s next administration even now by threatening that her voters won’t vote for Trump.
NOT voting for Trump IS voting for Biden.
If Nikki Haley is demanding her voters help Biden continue to destroy our country by refusing to vote for Trump then Nikki Haley and her voters will be responsible and we will never forget it.
Never Neocon Nikki.
Haley has alienated the people who supported her “Not Trump” campaign, and she’s permanently pissed off MAGA for daring to run a “Not Trump” campaign in the first place. That hardly leaves much of a winning coalition in 2028. I realize that Haley is a hack and an opportunist, but in this instance, she was specifically bad at not being good.
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Either she's dumb enough to think she can get the GOP nomination (despite being too servile to Trump for non-MAGAs, and too critical of Trump for MAGAs) or she's hoping to succeed Graham or Scott as Senator. I could see SC electing her--their two current Senators are shameless lickspittles so she'd fit right in.
I also like how Republicans know full well that Trump is completely unfit for the presidency, and so the only way they can justify to themselves why they'll support him is to buy into this absurd notion that Joe Biden is the scariest thing to ever inhabit the White House. Mr. "Republicans are my friends" and "we can negotiate something bipartisan", the guy who stands with NATO and Israel, who does everything by the book and won't even comment on the Special Counsel investigations lest it violate some norms, yeah HE'S just so horrible and scary that they have no choice but to support a wannabe Mussolini. But this is what they have to tell themselves, because otherwise they'd feel ridiculous.
I maintain that the purpose of her continuing her campaign was to convince Republican voters who didn’t want to vote for Trump that the party _isn’t_ actually just Trumpists now, and that they could still vote R even if that meant voting for Trump. They wanted to believe that Republicans are more than Trump, and the existence of Haley gave them that excuse, especially if she held out long enough for them to watch more conservative news. Her saying she will vote for Trump, after rightfully pointing out his horrors, gives those Republicans cover.
Conservatives and Liberals are literally hearing different news at this point. It started with the weird Fox fixations like “Obama phones,” where you couldn’t understand what their buzzwords meant and they would ramble on and on in vaguely racist ways but talking about things you’d never heard of. And now, they refuse to believe that large cities aren’t burning hellholes even if they live in those cities! We see the mainstream press picking up their rambles because otherwise they get accused of being stupid and out of touch, but instead of kiboshing the nonsense, they seem to have veered to giving it credence.
“Secure the border” is the weirdest rallying point: there are, perhaps, some border issues, but they are mostly local ones at the border (how do we provide for refugees?) or in large urban centers (how do we combat organized gangs with headquarters in other countries?). The Republican issue really seems to be some deep racism coupled with the fact that their policies (anti-union, anti-worker laws, no healthcare, no minimum wage, decreasing access to college,) don’t benefit the lower and middle classes. “The Border” just insists the threat is brown people and not those R policies. But Republicans of all stripes will be really frustrated if you argue that with them, because they are fed a diet of “crisis at the border!!!” and if you deny that crisis or suggest other ways to fix it, they insist you are just misinformed or Pollyannaing.
They really believe there is a recession, that Biden is stomping people’s rights, that someone is out there killing newborns, because their news says so. Those are Big Real Important issues unlike your boring old “raising the minimum wage will help you.”