Nikki Haley Has Run a Courageous Campaign

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 23, 2024

 

Say what you will about Nikki Haley’s ill-starred bid for the Republican presidential primary, but no one can honestly claim she did not spend the interim between New Hampshire’s election and Saturday’s South Carolina contest running as hard as she possibly could against Donald Trump.

 

Prior to the vote in the Granite State, Haley and every other non-Trump candidate in the race for the Republican presidential nomination pulled their punches against the former president. To varying degrees, the race to replace Trump featured candidates who refused to risk courting the animosity of the president’s hardcore supporters by levying unalloyed criticisms of Trump’s conduct in and out of office.

 

To some extent, it’s hard to blame the anti-Trumps in the GOP race for their diffidence. The polls had long indicated that Republican primary voters burdened anti-Trump Republicans with the impossible task of appealing to them, somehow, without criticizing the Republican front-runner. In that sense, the GOP’s voters set Trump’s opponents up for failure. Timidity is not a trait voters seek in their presidents, and the Republican primary electorate declined to reward it with their votes.

 

And as Trump’s opponents exited the race one by one, they each sidled up alongside the former president — demonstrating that their campaigns were not efforts to reorient the Republican Party back toward conventionally conservative policy prescriptions pursued by lofty figures possessed of characterological features worthy of emulation. They were enterprises dedicated to the acquisition of power. When opposing Trump offered a chance at power, they took it. When influence preservation required that they submit themselves to the gratuitous humiliation rituals to which Trump subjects his flatterers, they did that, too.

 

But since New Hampshire, Haley has taken a different course — burning her ships in the process. “I don’t care about a political future,” Haley told a crowd of supporters yesterday. “If I did, I would have been out by now.” We have no reason to believe she doesn’t mean it. Haley spent the better part of the last month savaging Trump from every angle in ways no one who privileges her future in a Trump-dominated Republican Party would.

 

Haley took maximum advantage of Trump’s implication-laden attack on her husband’s absence from the campaign trail (he is deployed to Africa with the South Carolina National Guard) to criticize Trump’s record expressing his mistrust of the men and women who dedicate themselves to national service. “If you don’t know the value of our men and women in uniform, if you don’t know the sacrifice that they go through, why should I — as a military spouse and all our military families — trust you to know that you’re going to keep them out of harm’s way?” she asked pointedly.

 

“It is unconscionable to me that a candidate would spend $50 million in legal fees,” Haley said of Trump’s efforts to siphon campaign funds away from his campaign coffers and those of his allies to satisfy his attorneys. “It explains why he’s not doing many rallies. He doesn’t have the money to do it.”

 

Indeed, the most recent filings indicate that the cash-strapped Republican National Committee has had to draw funds from the National Republican Campaign Committee just to stay afloat, cannibalizing the GOP’s prospects in the House to prop up its national ambitions. And if Trump’s hand-picked candidate for leadership in the RNC, his own daughter-in-law, has anything to say about it, the committee’s foremost job will be to continue to foot Trump’s legal bills. “Do you really think he is going to win against Joe Biden when he is spending that much on legal fees?” Haley asked. “He is not.”

 

“He is unhinged. He is more diminished than he was,” the former South Carolina governor said of the former president. Just as Americans have been forced to watch Joe Biden descend into senility, voters can expect Trump to decline into decrepitude, too. As Haley noted, people of Trump’s advanced age are “automatically going to be in mental decline. That’s just a fact.” She wore Trump’s threat that Haley donors, large and small, would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp” like a badge of honor, parlaying that attack into a fundraising bonanza.

 

Haley even declined to reproduce the GOP’s practiced effort to avoid noticing the former president’s conspicuous habit of establishing odious moral equivalences between the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “He sided with a guy that kills his political opponents,” Trump’s former United Nations ambassador observed. “He sided with a thug that arrests American journalists and holds them hostage, and he sided with a guy who wanted to make a point to the Russian people, ‘Don’t challenge me in the next election or this will happen to you, too.’” She called Trump’s flirtation with the notion that America would not honor its mutual defense obligations with allies that fail to devote 2 percent of GDP to defense a “bone-chilling” effort to “empower Putin.”

 

To Trump’s most zealous critics, Haley’s attacks on Trump stopped short of the sort that erstwhile Republicans who long ago left the party behind would like to have seen from her. Among Trump’s most ardent proponents, the former governor’s apostasy was unforgivable — a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions that puts her “into the Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger category.” Which is to say that Haley, unlike almost any Republican Trump critic before her, threaded the needle.

 

In the Economist/YouGov’s February 18–20 poll, for example, nearly 50 percent of self-described Republicans viewed Haley favorably compared with 39 percent who disagree. Nor has Haley alienated voters who will make up the general electorate in the fall. As survey after survey testing Haley in a head-to-head race against Biden attests, if she managed to secure the Republican nomination, a Haley candidacy has the potential to usher in an epochal electoral shift toward the GOP.

 

Alas, it is not to be. Although Haley has narrowed her deficit against Trump in the Palmetto State substantially and momentum is on her side, the gap between her polling and the front-runner’s is likely too great to overcome. Still, Haley should be commended for — finally and at long last — giving it to Republican voters straight, even at the cost of her reputation in the GOP. That is lamentably rare courage. And because she devoted herself so wholly to that project, Republican voters now cannot say in good faith that they were not warned.