Nikki Haley Gives Away the Store

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 23, 2024

 

The headline from Nikki Haley’s remarks to an audience at the Hudson Institute on Wednesday is that she tacitly endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy by confessing her intention to vote for him in November. The subhead is that her endorsement was an uniquely tepid one insofar as it was framed entirely as a rejection of Joe Biden’s presidency — a conclusion from which Trump benefits by default. Neither of these two takeaways center on the most interesting excerpt from her remarks on the 2024 presidential election. Rather, the most newsworthy portion of her comments involved her decision to neuter her own modest movement.

 

“Having said that,” Haley added following her statement in favor of Trump’s restoration to the presidency, “I stand by what I said in my suspension speech. 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.”

 

The obvious rejoinder to Haley’s unrequited outreach is, why should he? What is Donald Trump’s incentive to “reach out” to Haley’s supporters when she just gave away whatever leverage she still retained from the primaries? If Donald Trump assumes her voters are “just going to be with him,” that’s a pretty sound assumption given that Haley herself had done just that in the absence of any concessions from the Trump camp or the MAGA movement.

 

When it comes to the few Trump-skeptics who still call themselves Republicans, Trump can afford to rest on his laurels. Joe Biden has up to now done little to court those voters save his insistence that he is, in fact, courting them. But conservatives are wise to retain some misgivings about their association with a movement led by a figure who explicitly rejects conservatism and has stated his intention to supplant conservatism as the Republican Party’s ideological lodestar. It might have been wise for Haley, who fought for and won the mantle of the Republican articulating an alternative vision to Trumpism within the GOP, to hold out for some — in fact, any — concession from Trump to the virtues of limited government and free markets. Instead, she gave away the store.

 

If she had stood her ground, Haley might have extracted rhetorical or even policy concessions from the former president. But she didn’t. It was a missed opportunity — one of so many that has resulted in the Republican Party remaking itself in the image of one deeply flawed man.