Nikki Haley Threw It All Away
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I remember the first time I saw Nikki Haley. It was in a high school gym before the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Tim Scott, who was then a congressman, was holding a raucous town hall, and Ms. Haley was there to cheer him on. The first woman to be governor of South Carolina, the first Indian American ever elected to statewide office there, the youngest governor in the country. Whatever that “thing” is that talented politicians possess, Ms. Haley had it. People liked her, and more important, she seemed to like people. She talked with you, not to you, and she made routine conversations feel special and important. She seemed to have unlimited potential.
Then she threw it all away.
No political figure better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley. There was a time not very long ago when she was everything the party thought it needed to win. She was a woman when the party needed more women, a daughter of immigrants when the party needed more immigrants, a young change maker when the party needed younger voters and a symbol of tolerance who took down the Confederate flag when the party needed more people of color and educated suburbanites.
When Donald Trump ran in the 2016 Republican primary, Ms. Haley stood next to Senator Marco Rubio, the candidate she had endorsed, and eviscerated Mr. Trump as a racist the party must reject: “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the K.K.K. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president.” She was courageous, fighting on principle, a warrior who would never back down. Until she did.
The politician who saw herself as a role model for women and immigrants transformed herself into everything she claimed to oppose: By 2021, Ms. Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA with comments like, “Thank goodness for Donald Trump or we never would have gotten Kamala Harris to the border.” In one sentence, she managed to attack women and immigrants while praising the man she had vowed never to stop fighting. She had gone from saying “I have to tell you, Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten” to “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”
As a former Republican political operative who worked in South Carolina presidential primaries, I look at Ms. Haley now, as she prepares to launch her own presidential campaign, with sadness tinged with regret for what could have been. But I’m not a bit surprised. Her rise and fall only highlights what many of us already knew: Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he revealed it. Ms. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the G.O.P. into an autocratic movement. It’s not that she has changed positions to suit the political moment or even that she has abandoned beliefs she once claimed to be deeply held. It’s that the 2023 version of Ms. Haley is actively working against the core values that the 2016 Ms. Haley would have held to be the very foundation of her public life.
Her defining action as governor was signing legislation removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. This came after the horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and after social media photos surfaced of the murderer holding Confederate flags. Ms. Haley compared the pain Black South Carolinians felt to the pain she experienced when, as a young girl named Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, she saw her immigrant father racially profiled as a potential thief at a store in Columbia. “I remember how bad that felt,” Ms. Haley told CNN in 2015. “That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.”
Then came Donald “You had some very fine people on both sides” Trump, and by 2019 Ms. Haley was defending the Confederate flag. In an interview that December, Ms. Haley told the conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the Charleston church shooter had “hijacked” the Confederate flag and that “people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage.”
In her 2019 book, “With All Due Respect,” the sort of autobiography candidates feel obligated to produce before launching a presidential campaign, Ms. Haley mentions Mr. Trump 163 times, overwhelmingly complimentary. In one lengthy passage, she insists that she was not alluding to him in her 2016 Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, when she called on Americans to resist “the siren call of the angriest voices.” It is always sad to see politicians lack the courage to say what should be said, but sadder still to see them speak up and later argue any courageous intent was misinterpreted.
It didn’t have to be this way. No one forced Ms. Haley to accept Mr. Trump after he bragged about assaulting women in the “Access Hollywood” tape. No one forced her to defend the Confederate flag. No one forced her to assert Mr. Trump had “lost any sort of political viability” not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she “would not run if President Trump ran,” then prepare to challenge Mr. Trump for the nomination. There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that’s a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip.
Mr. Trump has a pattern of breaking opponents who challenge him in a primary. Ms. Haley enters the race already broken. Had she remained the Nikki Haley who warned her party about Mr. Trump in 2016, she would have been perfectly positioned to run in 2024 as its savior. But as Ms. Haley knows all too well, Republicans aren’t looking to be saved. The latest Morning Consult poll shows Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida together drawing 79 percent of Republican primary voters. Ms. Haley is at 3 percent, one percentage point more than Liz Cheney.
The female star of the current Republican Party isn’t the daughter of immigrants taking down the Confederate flag. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sells “Proud Christian Nationalist” T-shirts while becoming arguably the second-most-powerful member of the House in little more than one two-year term. If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination (and I think he will), he may well choose the election-denying loser Kari Lake as his running mate, not the woman who twice won governor’s races the old-fashioned way: with the most votes once the ballots were counted.
There is a great future behind Nikki Haley. She will never be the voice of truth she briefly was in 2016, and she will never be MAGA enough to satisfy the base of her party. But no one should feel sorry for Ms. Haley. It was her choice.
[ Mr. Stevens is a former Republican political consultant who has worked on many campaigns for federal and state office, including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush]
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Flip flopping is not armor and Trump will stab her with her knife.
The left's hate campaign against Haley is right on schedule.
Trump's invective will keep pace and will be worse than ever.
Seriously, Greg??
The left doesn't give a flying fuck about Haley. She may (probably not) have some impact on the right, but she's a nonentity for the left.
... and I have yet to seed an article on Nikki by a leftist. Go figure.
Yeah right. If all y’all didn’t truly give a shit you wouldn’t bother to be here bagging on her.
After the first hater, the rest of the worker bee’s started swarming. SOP
Buzz, buzz, buzz. ....
Wrongo! We want Haley to run. The more gop candidates the more likely Trump will get the nomination. If the gop nominates Trump Biden wins his 2nd term easily...
My gut is she is angling for Pence's spot.
Which will set her up for gop nod in 2028.
Some Democrats appear scared of a strong woman of color!
Of course. Progressives are trumps best friend. They claim he’s the worst person ever, threat to the country etc etc and yet spend millions to help him.
at least You admit it’s party over country.
Not me. I wish he would just shut up and fade away like most past presidents.
“Some Democrats appear scared of a strong woman of color!”
Please. Denying seats on a committee ring a bell?
As opposed to the gop’ers willingness to deny any woman, especially those of color, autonomy over their own reproductive rights?
Right, right, just articles by guys whose entire professional careers now consist of attacking Republicans…
Isn’t it time for another false flag tiki torch parade for stevens to organize?
That would be a major upgrade over who’s in that spot now.
Major!
Looky there the very FIRST post is all deflection--a new record!
My Comment wasn't about Haley. It was about Greg's foolishness.
Learn to read.
Then don’t mention Haley in your comment.
Learn how to communicate properly.
In case you are wondering about Nikki's necklace:
https://www.eatstayplaybeaufort.com/the-palmetto-tree-and-crescent-symbols-of-home/#:~:text=The%20crescent%20(no%2C%20it%20isn,the%20British%20Fleet%20in%201776.
Lol .... threw it all away and yet ....... she is running for POTUS.
Man .... she really fucked up right?
Wow! How did that pan out for Carly Fiorina?
About the same as Fauxcahontas Warren
Senator Warren?
Yes, by Jove, you got it!
Fauxcahontas IS a Senator.
Yes, my apologies if that earned title upsets delicate progressive sensibilities.
Seems Ann Coulter is not a fan of Haley. Ya gotta love the racist BS that Coulter is throwing at Haley telling her to go back to her country...LOL dumb ass Ann doesn't seem to understand that SC is a state in the US and she was born in the US.
And then MTG put in her two cents worth. LOL perhaps she can attack Haley with a space laser.
Everyone worries about the 'nuclear football' that gets carried around with the President, but who's got the briefcase with the codes for the Jewish space lasers?...
I guess I shouldn't joke too much about that, otherwise we'll hear of some rightwing conservative good ol' boy white supremacist militia trying to hunt down George Soros to retrieve the 'Jewish space laser football'...
LOL, it would be right up there with the Pizza House fiasco that the right followed and believed.
Haley is just another Republican pol. Happens to be a woman, but that's incidental.
It's noteworthy to the Republicans because there are so few people of color in their party.
Yeah, but she'll rise to number three. Any others will be wasting their time. Polls still have DeSantis ahead of Trump.
So what religion is the palm tree and the moon. If a sandy beach and clear water is involved, I might want to join.
It is the South Carolina flag...........
Don't ruin their fun of trying to link it to religion, or fascism or whatever it is today.
Then it is a no for me....
With apologies to Fagan and Becker:
It's the only one you own
You might use it if you feel better
When you get home
But you don't even know your mind…”
good one
A reason not to vote for Nikki? When she grows up she wants to be just like Pastor John Charles Hagee.
She grew up Sikh but converted to Christianity