Why Nikki Haley will never be president

Tim Alberta is one of America’s best political reporters. His profile of Nikki Haley in Politico is as fine a profile of a political candidate for the American presidency that has ever been written. In fact, it astonishes with regards to its revelations of Haley’s cynicism and self-delusion. Alberta’s character dissection of Haley reveals a hollowness that perfectly explains the ease of Trump’s conquering of the Republican Party. She believes in nothing except winning elected office and being liked. Her ambitions provided an instinct for calculated risk, which she exercised with discipline as she climbed the greasy Republican pole to become the governor of South Carolina. During her tenure, she took “old Dixie” down after a white supremacist murdered nine black worshippers at Mother Emanual AME Church after he prayed with them. The decision was heralded in the moment as a brave act. Was it? Or was it as easy a decision that a governor would ever face? Certainly, removing a symbol of hate, extremism and prejudice that was the battle flag of treason that killed 600,000 American soldiers and the banner of Jim Crow from the state house was the right thing to do. Why was doing the right thing imbued with qualities of heroism and courage, when none was required? The act was symbolic and the price was nil. What did Haley apparently take away from the experience? Obviously it was the idea that courage is performative, not substantive, and that what is real is entirely subjective. It helps explain her collapse as a Trump resistor to her rebirth as one of his great shills and useful idiots. 

There was never any substance around the idea that Nikki Haley was the “adult in the room” or the view pushed by The New York Times editorial page that Haley was one of the few figures to leave the Trump administration with “her dignity largely intact.” The simple truth has always been that the maintenance of dignity and proximity to Trump are an impossibility. She wears the burden of Trump’s rancidity and legacy because she advanced it. Haley was at the top of the Trumpian foreign policy debacle that saw him extort Ukraine, fellate Saudi Arabia, undermine NATO, and kowtow to Russia. She bears the burden of his racism, extremism and divisions because she profited from them personally and professionally. She rose on the tidal wave of Trump sewage, and it will drown her. 

Below is an amazing exchange between Alberta and Haley related to Trump’s claims about the election. Here is what Haley said:

“I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told me. “This is not him making it up.”

But Trump was making it up. To date, there had been no discovery of material voting fraud. The president’s legal team had lost 55 court cases and won just one. All 50 states had certified their results and sent a single slate of electors to the Electoral College. Despite all this—despite that politically, legally and constitutionally, it was game over—Trump was inciting threats against judges and elections officials and urging Americans to take matters into their own hands.

You have the president of the United States telling everyone that he was cheated, that the voting systems are corrupt, that we’re living in a banana republic where the deep state has rigged this election against him,” I told her. 

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

He believes it,” she smiled.

There’s nothing that you’re ever going to do that’s going to make him feel like he legitimately lost the election,” Haley said. “He’s got a big bully pulpit. He should be responsible with it.”

“Is he being responsible with it?” I asked.

“He believes it,” she replied.

Haley would only allow that Trump’s lawyers had “done a disservice to him.” But there was no accountability for his actions. When I pressed her—why couldn’t she answer the basic question of whether the president was acting responsibly?—Haley cut me off, pointing out the window toward an emerald-tinted putting green.

That would be like you saying that grass is blue and you genuinely believing it. Is it irresponsible that you’re colorblind and you truly believe that?” she said.

“But he swore an oath,” I said, incredulous at her analogy. “This is the president.”

“He believes he’s following that oath,” she shot back. “This would be different if he was being deceptive.”

But what about the president broadcasting a loop of lies that had been thoroughly debunked? Isn’t that being deceptive?

“He deserves the truth. Is he hearing the truth?” Haley told me. “I don’t think certain people around him are telling him the truth.”

Regarding her comments, there can only be three possibilities.

First, it means she believes what is real is what Donald Trump believes is real.

Second, she believes in nothing whatsoever. She is an American Albert Speer. She conned Alberta with claptrap about what Trump believes, which really shows her deep indifference towards the peaceful transition of power and the US Constitution —since Trump tried to murder one, and then kill the other.  

Third, she believes her audience is profoundly stupid, while she is exceptionally clever. 

Whether her state of cynicism and delusion is thin or thick is besides the point. What it reveals is a broken character that makes her call for “generational change” into a depressing continuation of the corrupt status quo. Apparently the Haley candidacy is to be a gender-powered call for more diverse and younger liars in the Republican Party. She stands in the middle ground between a George Santos, who is a complete fantasy, and Donald Trump, who simply believes in them as a neutral arbiter with the cynical talent to declare “who cares!” After all, if it’s not about Nikki Haley and her ambitions, it isn’t really that important.

Consider her take on January 6, which she despicably lacked the courage to watch, afraid no doubt of the tinge of guilt that must have momentarily welled up inside of her. She told Alberta she was “triggered.”

What triggered her? Was it the mob beating and bludgeoning police? Was it their deaths? Was it the confederate flag that was carried through the rotunda? Was it the mob who defecated and urinated on the floors of the US House and US Senate? It was none of those things.

The true travesty, according to Haley, was Trump’s disloyalty to the most servile and obsequious politician in American history: Mike Pence.  Whatever malfunction that exists in Haley’s spine, and whatever shortage of character and deficiency of patriotism she carries, it is important to understand this about her. She feels she was courageous and entitled to something really swell for going along with the flow so well, just like her friend Mike Pence.

They both share something in common. Neither of them had any idea about Trump’s disdain for democracy and the sedition in his heart until the very end. Before then, according to them, there were no signs of grasping instability, malice, cruelty, outrageous corruption and stunning dishonesty from Trump. All was well until the election and then, well, kaboom! It isn’t just disgracefully dishonest. It is spectacularly and brazenly so. Donald Trump isn’t difficult to figure out. If he was such a challenge for Haley, the office of president of the United States is the wrong job for her — and him. In fact, all of the Trump detritus from Pence to Christie to Haley are going to try and play this con. It won’t work. 

The Nikki Haley announcement is simply a prelude to her withdrawal. At least the first paragraph of her political obituary has been written. A woman who believed in nothing ran for president isn’t as exciting a story as it used to be. That’s too bad for Nikki Haley.

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