Haley enabled Trump. And I still hope she wins.
An opportunist who helped create a monster is still preferable to the monster.
You teeming masses who clamored for a Nikki Haley Presidential bid, your day has come:
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Tuesday announced her 2024 presidential campaign, making her former President Donald Trump's first opponent for the Republican nomination.
Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations for two years in the Trump administration, is expected to deliver her in-person announcement speech Wednesday in Charleston.
“It’s time for a new generation of leadership — to rediscover fiscal responsibility, secure our border, and strengthen our country, our pride and our purpose.” Haley said in her video announcement.
Haley accused the "socialist left" of seeing "an opportunity to rewrite history."
"China and Russia are on the march. They all think we can be bullied, kicked around," Haley said. "You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels. I’m Nikki Haley, and I’m running for president.”
[…]
She was deeply critical of Trump during his first bid for the White House — warning that his temper could cause a world war at one point — but nonetheless accepted a role in his Cabinet shortly after his election.
The U.N. ambassadorship boosted her foreign policy credentials while the U.S. was sanctioning North Korea and pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. She left after two years, just as a government watchdog called for an investigation into whether she violated federal ethics regulations by accepting gifts as ambassador.
Since departing the Trump administration, Haley at times has criticized the former president, but has frequently praised him.
The “socialist left” stuff in her announcement seems pretty Trumpy (or should that be DeSantisy?) to me, but it looks like she’s trying to have the not-Trump lane all to herself.
Good luck with that, sez JVL:
A Nikki Haley candidacy is premised on the idea that she is Not Trump. The theory behind this is that the Republican electorate’s preferences in 2024 can be divided into “Trump” and “Not Trump” lanes and that if Haley can win the “Not Trump” primary and then consolidate those voters, then she can win a head-to-head matchup against Big Orange.
But I want to put this in bold:
There is no “Not Trump” lane.
Let me explain.
The DeSantis challenge to Trump isn’t that Meatball Ron is “Not Trump”—it’s that he’s “Trump Plus.” The DeSantis electoral proposition is that he will give you everything Trump does—all of the fighting, the illiberalism, the culture war, the lib owning, the news cycle domination, the mean tweets.
The only difference is that DeSantis is more electorally viable.
In other words, Trump and DeSantis are fighting over the same 85 percent of the Republican electorate.
Nikki Haley and anyone else who jumps in trying to be Not Trump is fighting over the remaining 15 percent.
As per the T-shirt, he’s probably right. Doing a deep dive into the pros and cons of Nikki Haley running for President is a bit like talking about what Kirk Cousins will do when he becomes MVP of the National Football League next season.
And yet, I still think now is as good a time as any for Haley to take a Hail-Mary shot at the top job. If Mario Cuomo had launched a Presidential bid in mid-1991, when George H.W. Bush looked unbeatable, he might have become President.
The William Goldman rule - “Nobody Knows Anything” - always applies. It should be printed on currency and posted in public buildings.
In the comment section for that edition of the Triad, I had an exchange with some readers about whether we should be rooting for Haley to pull off an unlikely win, or for her to fall flat on her face and be totally humiliated by Trump.
On some visceral level, I can see the argument for the latter. As with most authoritarian leaders, Trump rose to power in no small part because the more “respectable” members of his party realized he'd tapped into something and decided to try co-opting it for themselves. They figured they could use him as a kind of front man to keep the rubes distracted while they carried on as usual behind the scenes.
We know how that worked out. Trump wasn’t locked inside with them, but they were locked inside with him. And now the guy who orchestrated a jerry-built attempted coup is still the front-runner for the party’s 2024 nomination.
Save for a handful of exceptions like Liz Cheney, Republicans to a man and woman fell into line. And while they grumble about him behind the scenes, they’re too cowed to offer anything more than veiled criticism when they know the microphone is on.
They should be forced to hang their heads in shame, and have it rubbed in their faces if they try running against Trump in 2024.
And now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way…of [bleep]ing course I want Haley to beat Donald Trump.
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