A Unitary GOP Moves to Crush Haley

By Christ Stirewalt

Saturday, January 20, 2024

 

CONCORD, New Hampshire—First it was Sen. Marco Rubio endorsing Donald Trump over Rubio’s home-state governor, Ron DeSantis, ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

 

Now it’s South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott with a slap in the face to his former governor, Nikki Haley, ahead of her do-or-die New Hampshire primary bid. 

 

“We need a president who will unite our country. We need Donald Trump,” Scott told an audience here, not betraying even a wink at a statement that is, even by Trump’s biggest fans, preposterous. 

 

The veepstakes has a new frontrunner, ladies and gentlemen.

 

The timing and sheer brutality of these endorsements is masterful politics. In both cases, former presidential candidates who were once darlings of the same conservative movement that Haley and DeSantis have been trying to rally, sent the same message: Resistance is futile, so get the best deal you can for yourself while you can.

 

Scott’s rebuke of Haley is particularly painful for his former home-state rival, but also for DeSantis in its own way. Insofar as what’s left of the 2024 primaries is also jockeying for 2028, Scott’s capitulation is  a strong cue that the race is over, denying the Floridian the chance to give chase and show himself as a serious contender. 

 

DeSantis actually needs Haley to have a good showing here. If Trump romps to a win like the one he enjoyed in Iowa, DeSantis won’t even get the chance to play spoiler later on. If Trump becomes the first Republican candidate who wasn’t a sitting president to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, the one-month span until South Carolina, which already looks like a blowout for Trump, would become unsustainable for either of his rivals. 

 

And while Haley is desperately trying to catch the frontrunner in New Hampshire, Trump is working to cut her supply lines. Her Granite State strategy depends on enticing independent voters and some crossover Democrats to vote for her to try to slow Trump down. It worked for Sen. John McCain here in 2000, and it could still work for Haley. 

 

That’s why while at the same time Trump is denouncing Haley as a RINO squish to Republican audiences, he’s also attacking her as too conservative, reminding liberals and moderates who despise Trump that they’d be casting their protest vote for a small-government, Tea Party star who, by policy standards, would be the most conservative Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan. Turn on MSNBC and you’re likely to get the idea from Trump’s ads that Haley is slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. 

 

If it works as intended, Haley’s reinforcements will stay home rather than associate themselves with a person who they only came to think of as a moderate by comparison to Trump. And Trump can count on Democrats to reinforce his message about Haley, whom the Democratic National Committee calls a “MAGA extremist.” They don’t want Haley getting crossover support any more than Trump does. Indeed, Democrats are enthusiastically helping Trump get to the nomination. 

 

Again, the strategy and execution here by Trump is impressive. The avalanche of endorsements, the ground game, the ad barrages. Primo stuff. This isn’t the 2016 Trump campaign of misfit toys Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, and Roger Stone. Now it’s real pros and veterans of the Bush era and before, like bulldog Chris LaCivita, management guru Susie Wiles, and ad wiz John Brabender. Karl Rove himself could hardly have done better than Trump’s effort so far. 

 

And yet, Trump the man has seldom been worse than he is these days. Still obsessed with his loss in 2020 and consumed by his ongoing legal woes, Trump isn’t the boisterous, tireless campaigner he was when he was, essentially, his own campaign manager eight years ago. 

 

His vendettas are deeper. His lust for power is stronger. Rather than the persona he adopted for 2016 of a billionaire playboy willing to give up his easy life to whip the government into shape, 2024 Trump seems desperate to return to authority. There was a madcap quality that has been replaced with a kind of cultish, often morose religiosity. His rallies used to feel like professional wrestling matches. Now they look like mega-church services with their own liturgies and hymns. 

 

There’s a doctrine of presidential power referred to as the “unitary executive,” which holds that everything in the executive branch falls under the authority of the president.

 

In the simplest sense, it holds that the president has constitutional authority, within the bounds of the laws passed by Congress, to direct the activities of all executive branch agencies as one unit. If President Joe Biden wants a permit granted, an employee reassigned, the walls painted yellow at the J.C. Watts Federal Building in Frankfort, Kentucky, the president can order it done. 

 

But while the branch may be unitary in this theory, the president isn’t. The president is also his appointees, whom he has deputized to execute his wishes. When a Cabinet secretary or agency administrator gives orders, it’s no different than if the president himself gave the directive.

 

There’s plenty of debate over how far this theory goes, but the idea is pretty well baked into our thinking about the presidency. Sometimes we write “the Biden administration,” but very often, especially in headlines, it just gets shortened to “Biden.” As if Biden himself had reclassified a wetland habitat for endangered toads, fired some wayward deputy assistant undersecretary, or raised the minimum price for whole milk. 

 

That’s a helpful way to think about Trump’s campaign, too.

 

In one part of Trump World, things are going better than ever. He’s one more big win away from winning the nomination by acclamation. Despite the rapid consolidation of the Republican field. Despite the ample funds provided to his challengers. Despite the many prosecutions. 

 

A couple of months ago, Republicans were bracing for a replay of 2016 and doing delegate math. Now, Trump is three days away from winning by acclamation.

 

But the Trump that is winning is the unitary Trump—the Trump that encompasses his professional campaign, legal team, army of surrogates, and now, the broad Republican establishment.

 

What we don’t know, though, is what would happen after an early knockout win and a general election season an unprecedented nine months in length. What happens when the story shifts from Godzilla Trump smashing the Republican villagers and Trump, outrageous and outraged legal defendant, to Trump, one step away from a return to the Oval Office? Especially if the economy keeps inching toward the sunny side of the street?

 

That could be a very abrupt adjustment for a party that seems to have forgotten what life in a general election with Trump is really like.