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The Soulless Hypocrisy of Nikki Haley [1]
['John Nichols', 'Chris Lehmann', 'Bhaskar Sunkara', 'Reed Brody', 'Rob Rogers', 'Steve Brodner', 'Joan Walsh', 'Jeet Heer', 'Rebecca Nathanson', 'Nawal Arjini']
Date: 2024-05-24 13:22:51+00:00
Politics / The Soulless Hypocrisy of Nikki Haley Haley has abandoned her opposition to Trump for political expediency. Joe Biden should use Haley’s words against her—and Trump.
Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley announced that she would vote for former president Donald Trump during an event at the Hudson Institute on May 22, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
The thing to understand about Nikki Haley is that she has always been an extreme right-wing Republican. Like her ideological soulmate former House Republican Conference chair Liz Cheney, Haley genuinely believes in the anti-union, anti-choice, anti-fairness agenda that has been the defining premise of the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan.
That, along with the former United Nations ambassador’s hyper-militarized approach to foreign policy, was why she often parted company with former president Donald Trump, whose self-absorbed authoritarianism has always outrun any interest he might have had in conservative ideological purity.
But, above all, Haley is a political hack who has never tempered her overarching ambition with moral clarity. That explains why she quietly endorsed Trump on Wednesday.
The former governor of South Carolina wasn’t about to put her country ahead of her political future, as Cheney appears to have done. She wants a future in Republican politics, and, in 2024, that requires what former Illinois Republican representative Adam Kinzinger described as Haley’s “pathetic” show of loyalty to Trump.
In the end, Haley’s cynical approach to politics is still more likely to boost Trump’s November rival, Democratic President Joe Biden, than the candidate she is endorsing. That’s because Haley got so into running against Trump during the first months of 2024 that she left a legacy of blunt assessments and brutal takedowns that can and should be echoed in Biden’s fall campaign appeals.
During the course of her 2024 Republican primary challenge to Trump—which continued in a zombified form on ballots across the country even after she dropped out—Haley softened the focus on her ideology and turned up the volume on her objections to the former president. Those objections became so pointed, and were voiced so robustly, that Haley became the primary season’s last remaining credible alternative to Trump.
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[1] Url:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/nikki-haley-voting-for-trump/
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