In her make-believe quest for the Grand Old Party’s presidential nomination, Nikki Haley seems to be having a grand old time. Sure, she lost Michigan on Tuesday and her home state of South Carolina last week and Nevada even though Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot — that was some fluke of electoral physics — but none of that matters in relation to what Haley has been up to since the death knell of her defeat in the New Hampshire primary. Since before then, perhaps.
She’s not running for president, or at least that’s not her sole or even principal goal in 2024. She’s running for a different kind of glory, and to some degree, she’s winning it, even though she doesn’t deserve it. That’s why she sounds so strangely joyful at times. It’s the source of her curiously robust energy.
As 2024 dawned, Trump’s dominance endured and Haley grappled with the fact that she didn’t have any job other than her candidacy to return to, she identified the next best thing to beating Trump: using him, for as long as possible, as a yardstick. Being measured against him.
Every day that she officially remains an alternative to him — no matter how technical, no matter how notional, no matter her failure to get even 30 percent of the vote in Michigan this week — is a day when Americans with an unfavorable view of him (the majority, mind you) have a newly favorable view of her. It’s a day when journalists raptly trail after her, when she’s welcome on pretty much any television news show, when at least a few pundits will praise her guts and her gusto for standing up to Trump, even though she bowed down to him for much, much longer. It’s a big, bold billboard for the new model Haley, who is taking on a titan and telling inconvenient truths. Catch her latest put-down of Trump! Behold her stamina! When this is all over, her speaking fees will be astronomical.
Haley has never known hagiography like this. And she’s young enough to play a long game. Trump is almost certain to be the Republican nominee, but there’s a very real chance, what with all those indictments and all his inanity, that he loses in November, that his rigged-election shtick is too predictable to have as much traction as it did in 2020, that Republicans take fresh stock of all the times since 2018 that they’ve underperformed under Trump’s leadership, and that they ask themselves what might have been.
Yes, they could instead take inventory of and revenge on anyone who didn’t sing his praises in an overwrought and unflagging voice. They could blame apostates for the pope of Mar-a-Lago’s ruin. In that case, Haley’s churchless. But if their obsequiousness to Trump is exhausted, their adoration of him spent? If they turn to his runner-up? By dint of perseverance, Haley has claimed that title.
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