By Nick Catoggio
Monday, May 20,
2024
You wouldn’t know it from my cheery disposition,
but the
polls lately have put me in a dark place, overcome with desperate
thoughts.
Where will I work after the Trump Justice Department
shutters The Dispatch for publishing “subversive material”?
What sort of contrived national emergency will be cited in 2028 to justify
suspending the 22nd Amendment? Which Anglosphere country is most likely to
grant me asylum?
And this one, which is really dark:
Should I hope that Donald Trump chooses Nikki Haley as his running mate?
The prospect of a Trump-Haley ticket seemed to have died
earlier this year when the nominee declared that anyone donating to her
henceforth would be “permanently
barred from the MAGA camp,” whatever that means. Ten days ago,
however, Axios cited
multiple sources alleging that Haley was “under active consideration” by
Trump’s campaign for VP. Trump himself quickly denied
it, but Trump denies a
lot of things that turn out to be true.
A few days after the Axios story
emerged, Gordon Sondland (remember
him?) published an op-ed
at the Wall Street Journal explaining why a Trump-Haley ticket would be
“a perfect match” for the GOP. That piece felt like a nudge to the campaign on
behalf of the conservative donor class that they’d be more likely to reach for
their wallets this fall if one of their favorite old-school Republicans ended
up on the ballot.
Meanwhile, political junkies were oohing and ahhing over
the results of the latest Republican primaries in Maryland and Nebraska. Both
of those primaries were
“closed,” meaning only registered members of the party could vote. And a
competitive race in the Democratic Senate primary in the former state ensured
that few liberals there would bother to re-register as Republicans in advance
simply to stick it to Trump by voting for his opponent.
Even so, Nikki Haley ended up getting 21.7 percent
in Maryland and
18.2 percent in Nebraska.
She’s pulled similar numbers in other primaries since leaving the race. The
bloc of disaffected “Haley Republicans” appears to be sizable, persistent, and
potentially lethal to Trump if he can’t find a way to convince them to come
home to the GOP in November.
Choosing her as his running mate could do the trick. He’s
nervous enough about losing disgruntled anti-vaxxers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
that he’s reportedly considered choosing Kennedy
as his running mate, allegedly even dispatching “emissaries”
to discuss the idea. If he’s willing to consider an alliance with a kook to
lure back one part of his base, he might consider an alliance with the
center-right Haley to lure back a different and probably bigger part.
Trump-Haley. It could happen. Should a Never Trumper in a
dark-even-for-me mood want it to?
***
For classical liberals, there’s a moral argument against
Nikki Haley joining the ticket and a practical argument against it—and the two
are connected.
The practical argument is that she might help Trump win.
How many times in this newsletter have I implored
conservatives to end the “Republican
hostage crisis” by boycotting any election that has Trump at the top of the
ticket? Reaganites won’t regain leverage over the direction of the party until
they show populists they’re willing to tank the GOP’s presidential prospects if
their concerns about post-liberalism aren’t addressed.
That’s less likely to happen if Trump sweetens the pot
for them by making a Reaganite like Haley his running mate.
Remember Clifford Asness, the inspiration for last week’s
newsletter about “Never
Trump vs. Never Again”? Asness was a loud-and-proud Haley guy in this
year’s primary; few Republicans have spent as much money as he has trying to
prevent a third Trump nomination. But he’s so angry at Biden for inching away
from Israel’s campaign in Rafah under pressure from the left that he’s now
thinking of supporting Trump in November as the lesser of two evils.
Adding Haley to the ticket might lock him down. The same
will be true of others among the 20 percent or so who keep voting for Haley in
Republican primaries. If you fear a second Trump term would be an ideological
disaster for conservatives and a civic disaster for America, any development
that gets us closer to it should be opposed.
The moral argument against putting Haley on the ticket is
that America deserves to suffer the consequences of its terrible choices. If
this moronic country is willing to gamble on Trump again after his coup attempt
four years ago, it should be forced to experience populism without the brakes
on.
This time, let’s dispense with the “adults in the room”
like James Mattis and John Kelly—and Nikki Haley—who might keep Trump from
steering off a cliff. Let’s lean into kakistocracy instead. The only way we’ll
learn our lesson about authoritarianism, it appears, is by getting a potent,
unfiltered dose of it. Had we gotten it in Trump’s first term, his career might
already be over.
Think of it like an infection. Plainly, we haven’t
developed antibodies to post-liberalism yet; only a raging illness that makes
us all very sick will generate the immunity we need to prevent future illness.
Assuming it doesn’t kill us in the process, of course.
So forget Trump-Haley and give us the Trump-RFK “pox
party” we deserve. The worse, the better!
Any way you slice it, having Nikki Haley on the ballot
this year would extend the shelf life of Trumpism. It would improve his chances
of regaining power; it would reduce the odds of him discrediting himself as
president; and it would reconcile conservatives to a party whose soul has been
thoroughly poisoned for at least four more years and probably longer.
All of that being so, imagine my despair in finding
myself suddenly thinking that … maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Not a good idea,
to be clear. But not the worst thing that could happen.
My epiphany stems from this: Trump is probably going to
win whether Haley is on the ticket or not.
***
I suspect that before the polls have closed in western
states on Election Night, the conventional wisdom will be congealing that it
was utter madness for Democrats to have nominated an 81-year-old for president.
Especially when many of his own voters have spent the past two
years warning pollsters they believe he’s too
old to serve effectively in a second term.
Inflation and the border and Israel will all get their
due, but in hindsight the silver-bullet explanation for why Biden lost will be
that the race ended up inescapably as a failed referendum on his fitness for
office. Having Trump on the other side of the ballot made it more competitive
than it should have been, but ultimately Democrats bet big and badly on the
belief that Americans would overlook Joe Biden’s condition if Trump was the
only alternative.
If that’s the outcome for which we’re headed, Vice
President Nikki Haley suddenly sounds not so bad.
It’s easy to like the idea of Americans being forced to
live under a kakistocracy of their own choosing when the prospect of it
happening is abstract, but it isn’t anymore. It’s less than six months away.
And it’s not just “Americans” who’ll have to live under it. I will too. And
you. And your family.
For the same reason I preferred not catching COVID to
catching it and falling gravely ill in order to build natural immunity, I would
prefer to deal with the authoritarian threat in some way that doesn’t require
the political equivalent of the country being placed on a ventilator.
We all would, if we’re being honest. If I told you that
Rudy Giuliani would be attorney general in a second Trump administration, you
might laugh and make jokes and snort that it “serves us right” for reelecting a
constitutional menace. But if you had a chance to replace him with Mitt Romney
or Liz Cheney, you’d seize that opportunity with both hands, no?
That’s the case in a nutshell for Vice President Haley.
We deserve to have Trump drive us off a cliff, but none of us
actually want to go off that cliff—especially at a moment when we’re
headed right for it and the vehicle is picking up speed and the sweat is
beading on our foreheads.
When President Trump inevitably starts babbling about
ditching NATO or pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea, it will be a small
comfort to know that a hawk as staunch as Haley is inside the room, pushing
back. Remember, if not for the “adults” at the DOJ and the Office of the White
House Counsel during Trump’s first term, his coup plot either would have
succeeded or thrust America into a far more dire constitutional crisis before
failing. You might “want” to see what a Trump presidency without the brakes on
looks like out of morbid curiosity—but you don’t really want
it.
There are other reasons to grudgingly prefer a
Trump-Haley ticket.
If I’m right that Trump is destined to win, it would be
good if traditional conservatives got a share of the credit. Winning with J.D.
Vance as vice president would “prove” the MAGA theory that populist nationalism
is the key to electoral success even if the ticket ended up underperforming
expectations. It might be decades before conservatives regained any influence
on the right. Winning with Haley, on the other hand, would “prove” that only a
movement that satisfies its conservative wing can prevail, especially if the
ticket ended up doing better than expected with wayward constituencies like
college graduates.
Having Haley as the VP nominee would also drive fanatic
nationalists nuts.
In its piece about her becoming Trump’s running mate, Axios
remembered how vehemently Trump’s allies denounced her during the primary. Donald
Trump Jr. vowed to “go to great lengths to make sure” she wasn’t
chosen for VP while Tucker
Carlson promised he’d advocate against a Trump-Haley ticket as
strongly as he could. They’re bluffing, of course, but having a Reaganite a
heartbeat away from the presidency in Trump’s second term would irritate the
MAGA faction to no end and cause real dissension on the right whenever the
president’s policies ended up emulating hers.
Every time Trump disappointed his base by choosing some
conservative priority over a populist alternative, she’d be scapegoated. Every
time a damaging leak from within the administration appeared in the press,
she’d be blamed. In 2028, the party might plausibly be paralyzed by a deep rift
between normie Republicans who’d expect VP Haley to succeed Trump as nominee
and populists threatening to break away if the GOP didn’t dispense with her
immediately.
That would be fun. And if it turns out that the hardcore
Tucker-style populist ideologues really do regard Haley as a dealbreaker on the
ticket, there’s a small chance that she might cost Trump this election. Imagine
millions of anti-vaxxers who were prepared to vote for him suddenly switching
to RFK because they can’t abide a “uniparty” candidate as his vice president.
Unlikely—yet glorious.
There’s a third reason to prefer Haley as VP, though.
She’s the only option left with a scintilla of dignity.
***
A few weeks ago I named Tim
Scott and Marco Rubio as among the least objectionable choices remaining on
Trump’s vice presidential shortlist. Whatever one thinks of their MAGA
cosplaying, I argued, each has been recognizably conservative on policy for a
long time. Those conservative instincts might reemerge as VP and influence
Trump for the better. We could do worse.
But what if Scott and Rubio are no longer “closet”
conservatives pretending to be populists to curry favor with the leader? What
if, like
Mike Lee, their ambition and cowardice are driving a bona fide ideological
conversion that would make them docile at best and zealous at worst with
respect to Trumpism upon becoming vice president?
No candidate in 2016 was more morally righteous than
Rubio in critiquing Trump’s pernicious influence on politics. Eight years
later, here’s the pitiful state to which he’s been reduced:
Scott gave a similar non-answer two weeks ago.
At around the same time Rubio was endorsing “Stop the
Steal II” for NBC News, fellow VP hopeful J.D.
Vance was explaining to CBS what America could learn from Hungarian
strongman Viktor
Orbán. And in Israel, a third short-lister, Rep. Elise Stefanik, was
turning her address to the Knesset into a low-key campaign
speech for Donald Trump.
Does anyone actually want to see one of these cretins
rewarded for their amorality with the vice presidency, however much a fallen
America might deserve them?
Wouldn’t it be gratifying to have Nikki Haley get the job
after taking Trump on while these four are left reckoning with the fact that
they prostituted their very souls for nothing?
I don’t mean to valorize Haley in saying that, as she’s
had many
undignified moments in trying to navigate the politics of the Trump
era. And joining the ticket would necessarily mean having more: She’d be
expected to make arguments that a sensible person shouldn’t make and to parry
arguments that a decent person shouldn’t resist. But she acquitted herself well
during the primary by not pawning her conservatism for knock-off populism, as
Ron DeSantis did, and she’s acquitted herself well since leaving the race by
declining to endorse Trump.
As his running mate, she’d be starting from a vastly
higher baseline of dignity than any of the current short-listers are. That’s
not an unalloyed good—he shouldn’t get to hide behind a fig leaf of his running
mate’s dignity after all that he’s done—but if we simply must be governed by
him and his rabble of cronies, having one person with a modicum of integrity
near the top would be a minor reassurance.
It could even be important if he ends up losing the
election. Marco Rubio and Tim Scott are bending over backward to show that, as
his running mate, they’ll support Trump if he tries to overturn another
election. Placed in the same position, Haley might not. And that refusal could
undermine the effort’s public credibility as Americans are once again forced to
try to puzzle out which side is actually trying to steal the election from the
other.
At this point, an obvious objection arises: What if
putting Haley on the ticket is the difference between defeat and victory for
Trump?
It’s fine to say that she’d have certain virtues as vice
president, but none of those virtues would justify returning him to the
presidency. Any Never Trumper would and should agree that if Haley’s presence
on the ticket would end up helping Trump decisively with key swing
blocs—college grads, women, independents—then we should hope that he passes her
over.
But what if it doesn’t actually matter who Trump’s VP is?
After a coup attempt, two impeachments, and four criminal
indictments, which voter out there hasn’t made up their mind about Trump yet
but might be tipped into supporting him if he chooses Haley as his running mate
rather than Rubio or Scott?
Granted, the 20 percent who keep voting for her in
Republican primaries is impressive and meaningful. But I don’t think those
people are truly “Haley voters.” I think they’re a mix of centrist and
Reaganite conservatives who chose her as a respectable protest vehicle to
express their dissent about the direction of the party.
They’re not anti-Trump because they’re pro-Haley; they’re
pro-Haley because they’re anti-Trump. And so if Haley herself decides she’s no
longer anti-Trump, it’s anyone’s guess whether most of those voters (Cliff
Asness excepted) would follow her lead or simply shift their allegiance to some
other staunch anti-Trump conservative who continues to articulate their
grievances about the GOP.
There’s an alternate universe in which figures like Liz
Cheney, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, and James Mattis endorse Joe Biden this
fall to try to create a “permission structure” for Trump-hating “Haley
Republicans” to cross the aisle. In that universe, do those Republicans remain
loyal to Trump just because Haley’s on the ticket with them, or do they follow
the lead of Cheney et al. by casting a second vote this year against a
demagogue whom they despise?
My guess is that they remain loyal to Trump, but not
because of Haley. Because he’s a Republican.
The difficult truth is that Haley is unlikely to be named
VP because Trump doesn’t need her to be VP in order to win. If he trailed Biden
by 5 points in the polls, he might be so desperate to win over her voters and
unite the right that he’d conclude he has no choice but to join forces with
her. He’s not trailing, though; he’s
winning because some critical mass of “Haley Republicans” continues to
prefer him to Biden notwithstanding their aversion to him in the primaries.
They’re conservatives, but they’re also partisans. And as
we’ve seen over and over ad nauseam since 2016, when those two identities
conflict, one clearly and consistently takes precedence over the other.
“For years, Republicans have wondered whether MAGA champions and traditional conservatives can coexist,” Gordon Sondland wrote in making the case for a Trump-Haley ticket. “Can Matt Gaetz and Mitt Romney be happy under the same political roof? Yes, they can. MAGA doesn’t need to change, and neither do traditional Republicans.” That’s almost totally wrong, as MAGA does need to change for the good of America and Mitt Romney is emphatically not happy under the same roof as Matt Gaetz. But I think Sondland’s right about coexistence: Populists and conservatives will “coexist” this fall by both backing Trump in heavy numbers. And that’ll be true whether Haley is on the ticket or not.
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