Nikki Haley is an American Albert Speer

Donald Trump believed he won, and therefore, according to Nikki Haley, his sedition was excusable because his belief lies above the truth, where it floats in a state of perpetual delusion. Haley, unable to abase and debase herself within the same rigid framework of her gelatinous-spined male peers, has made up an alternate reality where she didn’t know that Trump was an unfit sociopath and congenital liar. According to Haley, he simply snapped at the end of four golden years, during which America stood tall, and Niki Haley steered the great ship of state at the United Nations.

The truth is that she played the role of a lesser Ivanka on Jared Kushner’s diplomatic team. She was Rick Grenell in heels, fronting Steve Bannon’s foreign policy. What is it exactly that she accomplished? For what achievement can she claim credit — besides being a MAGA lieutenant who nearly helped topple American democracy? Nikki Haley is a pedestrian figure, and has long been overhyped in the speculative parlors where the DC access game plays out. She is bland and uninteresting, except for one thing, and that is her assertion of shock at discovering who Trump really was. She is a latter day Scarlett O’Hara, who was victimized by a rapacious man. That man “triggered” her by betraying his most trusting acolyte Mike Pence, who he tried to hang during his attempt to overthrow the government and burn the US Constitution.

Haley has a rare talent for generating sympathy from fierce critics of Trump for somehow being “apart” from what she was so deeply involved in. The New York Times opinion editorial upon her departure from Trump’s cabinet is a perfect example. It is as if she was selected by the American political media to be the designated survivor. Perhaps though it is because she is so skilled at playing the double game — winking and dancing away from the extremism, while simultaneously fanning and supporting it. Maybe because she was always ready with a background story for the nearest Trump-era access reporter to share a story of behind the scenes heroism in which she alone stood up to Trump. Like all of her cowed colleagues, Haley would denounce Trump in private and tell anyone who would listen how crazy he was, but her effect with the routine landed differently. Many in the access media actually believed she meant it. They bought into the fallacy that her presence tempered Trump and restrained him, and was therefore necessary, vital and important. She was the “good” MAGA. 

The instinct to find goodness out of rottenness, and find a person to exculpate and hold apart from a cabal — no matter how venal — as somehow different, better, sympathetic and understandable is a powerful force. There is no better example of such a person in the 20th century than the Nazi war criminal Albert Speer.

He was among the 20 Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg Trials that were conducted by the four victorious powers. The associate justice of the United States Supreme Court Robert Jackson, who ultimately became chief justice, served as the chief American prosecutor. Francis Biddle had served as attorney general under FDR throughout the Second World War, and was the American judge on the presiding panel. His notes on the proceedings were part of a chapter titled “Nuremberg: The Fall of the Supermen” that was part of his autobiography, “In Brief Authority.” The account details the animosity between Speer and Herman Goering, and begins with a description of Goering from a fellow defendant, Dr. Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s minister of economics. The connection between extremism, totalitarianism and corruption is inexorable. Goering was the most corrupt person of a corrupt movement. He was a figure of preposterous excess and insatiable greed that offers few comparable examples over the last 80 years of history. Trump is one of them.

Schacht hated Goering with a scornful, jealous bitterness, for it was Goering who had forced him out of power. About Goering in an interrogatory, Schacht said:

Endowed by nature with a certain geniality which he managed to exploit for his own popularity, he was the most egocentric being imaginable. The assumption of political power was for him only a means to personal enrichment and good living. The success of others filled him with envy. His greed knew no bounds. His predilection for jewels, gold, and finery was unimaginable. He knew no comradeships… In his personal appearance … one could only compare him to Nero, [appearing at tea once in a sort of Roman toga and sandals studded with jewels, his fingers bedecked with innumerable jeweled rings … his lace painted and his lips rouged.

Biddle observed the fallen Nazis day after day, and observed their succumbing to the most base and basic human behaviors. Yet his writings also indicate that Biddle, too, was easily seduced. He was taken in by the idea that one among them had to be more decent than the rest. That man was Albert Speer. 

We watched the defendants day after day, these drab men once great, most of them now turning on the Führer, who had led them to their brief spasm of violent triumph. A few were still loyal. Some felt that it was not “correct” to attack a dead man who had been head of the state. Others transferred their guilt to the man who, they said, was alone responsible, from whom, they pleaded, orders came that had to be obeyed; theirs but to do or die, they argued; how could there be a conspiracy, a meeting of the minds, as the prosecutors claimed, when one man’s mind commanded all the others? …

Before long there developed, among the twenty-one accused, two groups under different leaders. The majority, particularly at first, before the worst of the testimony came out, followed Goering, from whom still emanated something of the old charm, the compelling ruffian power. Goering sustained the vanishing legend of the Reich, the intoxicating dream of a superior race that in the early days had clouded their minds and swollen their hearts with the excitement of the primitive, the barbaric romance of lawless men.

Hermann Goering was the prime exhibit of Nazi evil. Albert Speer was the most humane and decent of the defendants. His straightforwardness and honesty, his calm and reasonable bearing, his awareness of the moral issues involved, impressed the members of the Tribunal. Speer, who was 41 when he was tried, must have been a highly impressionable young German, idealistic and prone to hero worship, when he joined the party in 1932. Soon, he became Hitler’s personal confidante, and lavished a passionate admiration on his chief — if one can judge by the bitterness of his ultimate disillusion.

A man of striking ability, Speer took charge of all war production. He was one of the few men trusted by Hitler. It was not until the last days that Speer began to question the character of his leader. Said Biddle about Speer:

Doubts had of course begun to cross his mind; but, working continually at his immense production job, aloof from the chicaneries and plots that eddied around the seat of power, he seemed, like so many other idealists, to have been unwilling to face a reality which was bound to destroy the faith that had meant everything to him.

Albert Speer escaped the hangman’s noose, and was sentenced to spend 20 years in Spandau prison. He served every day of that sentence, and was released from prison in 1965. He would live for another 16 years, and he would continue to impress scores of people as the “good Nazi.” During the Nuremberg Trials, a survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp was asked if he recognized any of the defendants. He pointed directly at Albert Speer and said, “Speer.”  Speer denied that he had any knowledge of the Holocaust and the murder of the Jews, even though, as the Nazi in charge of war production, he had 14 million slaves provided by the SS working in his armaments factories. When his fellow defendants heard his denials during the trial they laughed out loud. Speer invented the “Sergeant Schultz defense.” 

Albert Speer wrote his best selling accounts of the Thousand-Year Reich, “Inside the Third Reich,” and “Spandau: The Secret Diaries.”

What happened next seems astonishing, but it is true. Hollywood came calling, and a meeting was set about turning Speer’s story into a movie. There is a documentary that tells the incredible story. It is called “Speer Goes to Hollywood,” and is built around a re-creation of the taped conversations between an ambitious young screen writer atop the Paramount project and the Nazi criminal. In the end, the film is never made, and though Speer died a wealthy and rehabilitated man in 1981 London, all of his efforts were in vain. What he proved was the naïveté of his observers and interlocutors, as well as the human compulsion to find the good in even the darkest places. Speer lived as a Nazi and died as a Nazi. He was a war criminal and a slave master. He couldn’t outrun history or reality in the end.

Speers was much smoother, more clever and better at manipulating people and the truth than Nikki Haley, who knew nothing, saw nothing and heard nothing — but cared enough about her friend the president to check in on him because she was “worried.” Certainly, it has a chance to be compelling to the most simple-minded and conspiratorially-disposed among us, but it isn’t real. Even though there are too many people who have a delusional relationship to reality who are involved in our politics, there aren’t enough of them for Nikki Haley to win the Republican primary.

The GOP/MAGA voters aren’t in the mood for sweet tea and sugary banalities. They want red meat. They want the main event. They want Trump vs Desantis. Nikki Haley has already lost. The tragedy is that she doesn’t seem to know it. She seems lost, befuddled and bewildered. Maybe that’s because, by losing her integrity, she lost her ability to not just tell right from wrong and fulfill her duty, but her ability to look at herself in the mirror.

Shameful people can go far in American life, but they always run out of rail. That’s where the Nikki Haley train is headed — right off the tracks and over the cliff. The past always catches up. 

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