Trump or Haley Is an Ugly Choice, But a Clear One
The good options for saving America are officially closed to us.
Now that the possibility of getting a good Republican nominee for president in 2024 is officially closed to us, conservatives find ourselves in the much more familiar situation of determining which of the pathetic excuses for public servants we have left to choose from is less horrid than the other. Also familiar: the choice is already purely academic.
As a practical matter, Donald Trump’s coronation is a done deal, with Republicans in 48 of the Union’s 50 states never having gotten a say in the matter. Nikki Haley was just soundly defeated one-on-one in the state most favorably inclined to her, and she’s on track for an even more embarrassing loss of the state where she served as governor. So what follows will be a theoretical exercise to help clarify conservative thinking and priorities, not a call with any expectation of actually affecting the outcome.
As we’ve discussed before, Nikki Haley is almost everything you don’t want in a prospective Republican standard-bearer. She’s a moderate. She’s a darling of the Beltway swamp. She’s deferential to Chamber-of-Commerce sensibilities. She’s predisposed to accepting lefty media hoaxes. She panders to “consensus” fetishists. She’s frequently tone-deaf and just plain dumb.
She is also vastly preferable to Donald Trump.
I grant that this is not the prevailing narrative, even on the non-MAGA right. Trump, rather than Haley, was overwhelmingly DeSantis voters’ second choice, indicating that even those who recognized that Trump was the wrong choice didn’t fully understand why. Hopefully this column can help clarify things.
Most conservatives seem to simply take it as a given that a Haley administration would be to the left of a Trump administration. To the left of Trump’s first term might be a reasonable assumption. But those who recall how Trump’s presidency actually went should recognize that any such difference would be marginal, and throughout the past year Trump has been signaling leftward shifts for a second term, meaning that in all likelihood, they would be a wash on policy (if not Haley actually turning out slightly more conservative; at least she’d have a reelection to worry about).
Establishmentarian? Trump is a card-carrying member. Tone-deaf and dumb? Look at the alternative. Judgment and character? Haley is an average politician with all that entails on both counts; Trump’s personal degeneracy gives Democrats a run for their money, and he’s genuinely, deeply unwell on psychological and emotional levels. Personnel? Both would fill their administrations with Swamp Republicans, while the months and years since Trump lost the first time have been a series of warning signs to anyone with any self-respect or redeeming qualities to stay the hell away from him unless they want to put up with public humiliation from their own boss and/or risk the possibility of serious legal jeopardy, leaving only the most nakedly despicable and/or self-destructively incompetent to fill the top jobs. Foreign policy? As UN ambassador Haley was part of the foreign policy team MAGA worships Trump for, for better and for worse, and the idea there’s some massive gulf between them is less about substance and more a matter of Trump’s record being exaggerated and populism infecting the Right with lies and ignorance about any strain of thought outside of knee-jerk isolationism.
It's bad enough that DeSantis, apparently forgetting he only pledged to “support the nominee” rather than to endorse the frontrunner before he was the nominee, preposterously cast Trump as an antidote to the “old Republican guard of yesteryear” despite all of the above; but to suggest Trump and Haley are significantly different on “corporatism” was doubly nonsensical. We discussed yesterday how both attacked DeSantis from the left for his stand against Disney; let’s also recall that, while his son Don Jr. was telling conservatives to go easy on Anheuser-Busch for promoting transgenderism because they were such good GOP donors, Trump himself (who had between $1-$5 million in Anheuser Busch/InBev stock) kept his mouth shut until eventually declaring that the company “now understands” that money talks—implying it was time to end the boycott. He also bashed DeSantis for not being an ethanol corporatist, and wasn’t one of the top themes of Ron’s campaign Trump’s complete acquiescence to Big Pharma?
But the biggest reason to prefer Haley to Trump is not how the two of them would compare on a candidate scorecard, but what their respective victories would do to the Republican Party and conservative movement in the long term.
Both would be bad presidents, but unlike Trump, virtually nobody on the Right except the Beltway old guard or the donor class would insult conservatives’ intelligence by presenting Haley otherwise. She would not have a cottage industry of talk radio luminaries, conservative media lapdogs, or fly-by-night grifters working overtime to redefine conservatism to preserve a marketable image of her as “based,” or defining leadership down so she can do no wrong, to the point where objectively-superior-in-every-way alternatives are overwhelmingly rejected. Her betrayals and screw-ups would be unflinchingly presented to conservative audiences as exactly that, instead of being rationalized or outright suppressed. Her endorsements (if she even went out of her way to make them) would not exert outsized influence in crucial state and congressional primaries. Any resentment stemming from personal drama with other Republicans would be less likely to spill over into sabotaging general elections. Her victory would not reward a pack of villainous freaks and their abhorrent behavior, or validate their actions as the way to get ahead in the GOP going forward. She does not come with the dynastic ambitions of parasitic offspring we would have to contend with four years later.
In short, for all of Nikki Haley’s many sins and defects, she does not come with anything even close to MAGA's combination personality cult/marketing racket that has already turned most of the national-level professional Right into a corrupt, impotent horror, nor would her victory complete the zombification of conservatism—the only bastion of resistance to the Left’s unmaking of America—into a blob of nothingness completely incapable of outlasting her or defeating the Left.
It's true that a Haley presidency would be a return to the “old Republican guard of yesteryear,” but despite Trump’s 2016 election being intended as a rebuke of that old guard, Trump didn’t replace it with anything better. Instead, he was happy to let himself be assimilated into it, with his only real changes being the introduction of his own brand of sleaze. If Haley had any chance of beating him for the nomination, her election might have inadvertently given us another chance at curing it, simply by giving us a view of what we were fighting against unobstructed by grift and cultism.
Alas, she doesn’t. So now, as we’ll tackle in the next column, conservatives are left with no other choice but to try to set America back on track the hard way.