No, Trump's Probably Not Picking Haley as His Running Mate
Of course, if he did, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.
This week, Trumpworld erupted with warnings that MAGA would “revolt” if Dear Leader selects establishment squish Nikki Haley as his running mate, while Donald’s enemies have seized the opportunity to stoke fears that he might do exactly that. For this humble observer’s two cents, just about everybody is most likely wrong.
It’s plausible that Haley is still harboring some degree of delusional hope of being selected, which may well have been why she ran in the first place before getting the fantasy of being a real candidate in her head. Between Matt Gaetz, Roger Stone, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and company all denouncing the possibility at the same time and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara refusing to rule it out, it sounds like at the very least a trial balloon was circulated. And one always has to keep in mind that we are living in an age where the correlation between political decisions and any semblance of logic has never been weaker, so anything’s possible.
Even with all that in mind, the prospects of a Trump-Haley 2024 ticket don’t past the smell test.
And not because she’s too liberal or establishmentarian for him—Trump hired, enabled, and elevated as many Swamp Republicans as anyone during and after his presidency (including Haley herself once before)—but after the post-2020 shattering of his relationship with Mike Pence, it’s hard to imagine Trump picking anyone who posed any risk of not wanting to put themselves out on whatever idiotic, self-destructive limb he might decide is necessary to save his skin when there’s no shortage of more compliant options. And it’s equally hard to see how the GOP would force him to.
It's not hard to see why plenty of establishment types would hope Trump would go for such an arrangement, especially if he’s convicted of a crime before the election and/or impeached shortly after taking office, in which case Haley would step in and become the president they really want. But that doesn’t mean Trump couldn’t just tell them to go pound sand. As we’ve discussed before, Trump is already either joined at the hip with or endorsed outright by the heads of every major national party institution leader except for Mitch McConnell (Senate GOP leader) and Kim Reynolds (Republican Governors Association chair). National Republicans have been far too submissive toward Trump to start playing hardball with him now.
One theory goes that Trump would agree to it because his trials will leave him so strapped for cash that he would need Haley’s donors. But while I don’t doubt that has been informally floated by a politico or two, it’s overlooking some basic things as well—like the fact that Haley’s donors are behind her in large part because they hate Trump. If she were to join forces with the very guy they’re (idiotically) propping her up to defeat, they wouldn’t suddenly decide he’s not so bad just because she came with him. And there’s no way the RNC wouldn’t help out with Trump’s legal bills once he’s the nominee and they have no other choice.
But like I said, we have to admit that anything’s possible in these nonsensical times. That being said, the thing about all this people are most wrong about, hands-down, is the idea that MAGA would revolt if Trump did pick Haley.
Like they revolted over the bump-stock ban? Or the First Step Act? Or his talk of a DREAMer compromise? Or Fauci and the lockdowns? Or the Covid vaccines? Or embracing Black Lives Matter? Or trashing the pro-life movement? Or leaving January 6 prisoners to rot? Or losing to Joe Freaking Biden? Or sabotaging the 2022 midterms? Or anything else he screwed up and neglected?
If Donald Trump really did choose Nikki Haley as his running mate, his standing would diminish in the eyes of people who are being fed a false image of him by talk radio, but by then he’d be the nominee and there would be nothing they could do about it. But in the eyes of true-blue MAGA? The hat-wearing, rally-going faithful who would shell out thousands of dollars just to own a scrap of his clothing?
Of course they wouldn’t revolt. They would excuse it just like they excuse everything else he says and does and fails at and betrays them over. The God Emperor would simply be “keeping his enemies close” once again as part of his indecipherably brilliant multi-dimensional chess strategy.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It would be so easy for Republicans to, for the first time in decades, nominate credibility, conservatism, effectiveness, and electability all in one package. Instead, much of the party seems hellbent on repeating a cautionary tale that probably won’t come with a running mate Haley, but will be functionally indistinguishable from whatever we’d get if it did.