When an anonymous official took to the New York Times in September 2018 to declare that he or she was “part of the resistance inside the Trump administration,” many eyes in Washington fell on Nikki Haley.
Once an outspoken Trump critic, as governor of South Carolina, Haley endorsed Marco Rubio during the 2016 primaries and lambasted the GOP front-runner on the campaign trail. “Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten,” she said at one Rubio campaign event. “I taught my two little ones, you don’t lie and make things up.” She thundered, “A man that chooses not to disavow the KKK — that is not a part of our party. That’s not who we want as president. We will not allow that in our country.”
At the time, her contempt for Trump ran so deep that she even used her Republican response to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech as an opportunity to take a thinly veiled jab at Trump. “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” she said. “We must resist that temptation.”
So, it was natural that when an anonymous official wrote of a movement to thwart Trump from within, Haley, the onetime Never Trumper who had gone on to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, would be a leading suspect. But Haley’s response to the rumors was swift and forceful. In a dueling op-ed in the Washington Post, Haley blasted the anonymous official, saying of the behavior: “It is cowardly, it is anti-democratic, and it is a disservice to our country.”
At the same time Haley sought to come across as a loyal soldier, she went out of her way to avoid the perception that she had become a Trump toady. “I proudly serve in this administration, and I enthusiastically support most of its decisions and the direction it is taking the country,” she wrote. “But I don’t agree with the president on everything. When there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. I pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person.”
As Haley maneuvers herself toward a seemingly inevitable run for president in 2024, her response to the anonymous op-ed has become emblematic of how she is trying to navigate a party with an uncertain future. The pattern of loyal defenses of Trump sprinkled with a reminder that she has differences with him has repeated itself throughout her tenure at the U.N., in her resignation from the position, and, most recently, in interviews accompanying her book With All Due Respect.
On paper, Haley would appear to be a strong candidate for a future Republican presidential nomination. She brings executive experience as a popular governor, but unlike most governors running for president who face the problem of not having a foreign policy background, she could tout her time at the U.N., for which she received generally good reviews. And being a female, she could calm party insiders eager to win back over suburban women alienated by Trump. But the big X-factor is what the party is looking for after Trump.
Once Trump is no longer on the ballot, which way does the Republican electorate go? Does the party continue to move in a populist direction, with presidential candidates claiming the mantle of Trump as they once did with Ronald Reagan? Or will candidates rush to disassociate themselves from the Trump era, as happened with George W. Bush?
To date, Haley’s careful strategy has been to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so that she can position herself for whatever the political environment may be in 2024. If the situation calls for it, she can portray herself as somebody who happily served in the Trump administration and point to many supportive statements. If the party turns against Trump, she can cite disagreements and portray her time as U.N. ambassador as an example of answering the call to serve her country, despite her personal reservations. Or, she can find a way to fuse the two elements of the party, paying due deference to Trump while charting a kinder, gentler course.
While on the surface, this strategy would appear to be the safe one, it also comes with a high degree of risk. Presidential primaries are littered with bodies of once-promising candidates who were supposed to appeal to a broad constituency but ended up faltering as they self-consciously tried to be consensus candidates. Instead of winning over the electorate, they ended up struggling to inspire anybody and alienating all sides.
This was the case with Rubio, the candidate Haley endorsed in 2016. Rubio almost could have been designed in a laboratory by Republican political consultants. He gained national fame as a Tea Party icon and was seen by many in the establishment as somebody who could woo Hispanics and young voters, which party leaders saw as essential to winning in a demographically changing America. But his candidacy flopped as Trump went in an entirely different direction and appealed to the Republican electorate on a much more visceral level.
More recently, there is the example of the implosion of the candidacy of Sen. Kamala Harris. Once a front-runner for the Democratic nomination among political insiders, Harris tried to position herself to be acceptable to the far Left while also being acceptable to the party establishment. As a black female, she was also seen as somebody who could appeal to multiple constituencies in the diverse Democratic electorate. Yet her efforts to be acceptable to everybody ended up leaving her without a base, and she was forced to drop out months before Iowa. In contrast, the remaining top candidates either forthrightly represent the far Left (Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) or they have rejected the most extreme elements of the party and have asserted a pragmatic approach of working within the system to achieve traditional liberal goals more incrementally (Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg).
Haley’s transparent strategy of trying to alternate between being a critic or champion of Trump carries a similar risk. In a 2024 primary that is likely to include candidates who have been more consistent in their support for the president, Haley has provided a treasure trove of comments before, during, and after her service in the Trump administration that could be used to sow suspicion about her among Trump supporters and draw accusations of cynical virtue signaling.
In addition to her Never Trump activism during the 2016 primary, Haley on a number of occasions has tried to distance herself from Trump. In August 2017, when Trump came under fire for equivocating in the wake of the Charlottesville riots, Haley let it be known that she had a “personal conversation” with Trump about the events. In an email to aides, she wrote, “We must denounce them at every turn,” and the message conveniently leaked to CNN. In her book, she recounted that she was “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s remarks. On another occasion, she said that women accusing Trump of sexual misconduct “should be heard.”
After announcing her resignation from the ambassadorship in the fall of 2018, Haley tried to differentiate herself from Trump’s caustic rhetoric toward political rivals. “We have some serious political differences here at home,” Haley told the Al Smith charity dinner that year. “But our opponents are not evil. They’re just our opponents.” When Trump sounded off on the late Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore congressional district this August and sarcastically tweeted about his house having been robbed, Haley replied, “This is so unnecessary,” with a disappointed emoji. This time, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway shot back, “THIS is so unnecessary Trump-PENCE 2020.” The emphasis on “PENCE” seemed to be a reference to rumors that Haley was going to replace Pence as Trump’s running mate in 2020 (a narrative that Haley has publicly shot down).
During her time as ambassador, Haley leaned into the areas of foreign policy on which she agreed with Trump, adding moral force at the U.N. in making the case for Israel’s right to self-defense in the face of Palestinian terrorism, as well as Trump’s decisions to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and pull out of the Iran deal. But she was also more pointed in her criticisms of Russia’s behavior. Following Trump’s July 2018 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Haley declared, “We don’t trust Russia. We don’t trust Putin.”
Haley has also signaled an adherence to a more aggressive Republican foreign policy, in contrast to Trump’s jeremiads about putting an end to “endless wars.” In the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from Syria, Haley tweeted, “We must always have the backs of our allies, if we expect them to have our back. The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against ISIS in Syria. Leaving them to die is a big mistake.”
The various signals that Haley sent out to distance herself from Trump made her a favorite Trump administration official among Never Trumpers, who in some cases openly fantasized about her mounting a primary challenge to Trump in 2020. But her defenses of the president during her book tour have turned off the Never Trump crowd, who now see her as just another compromised Republican.
When Haley resigned as ambassador, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, a fervent Never Trumper, gushed over Haley, writing that “she is the only Cabinet-level official whose stature has arguably increased (or at least not decreased) during her time in the administration.”
But then came Haley’s book. In the book, Haley lamented that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former chief of staff John Kelly tried to recruit her in an effort to “save the country” by undermining Trump. In her book tour, Haley also offered a defense of Trump on the Ukraine matter. “So, do I think it’s not good practice to talk to foreign governments about investigating Americans?” Haley said. “Yes. Do I think the president did something that warrants impeachment? No, because the aid flowed. And, in turn, the Ukrainians didn’t follow up with the investigation.”
Haley’s turn, Rubin wrote, was an indication that there weren’t any “good” Republicans who served under Trump. “It must be sobering to acknowledge that she is simply another cynical, ambitious pol willing to put the country at risk to serve her own future political ambitions,” Rubin fumed.
Rubin was not alone. The internet has been flooded by anti-Haley takes among Trump’s critics. Conservative Matt Lewis of CNN and the Daily Beast, who described Haley as one of the “heroes” of his 2016 book criticizing the Trump GOP, sighed, “What we’re left with is a woman who has alienated those of us who used to respect her, yet will never be crazy enough for those Trump supporters who will never forget (or forgive) who she used to be. It’s a shame. She could have been a hero. Or, at least, a contender.”
No doubt, in a world where every hour seems to usher in another news cycle, the 2024 Iowa caucuses are several lifetimes away. It is far too early to rule anybody in or out of the presidential sweepstakes so far in advance. It may seem that the safe bet in the face of uncertainty is to plant the seeds to run in any political environment. But it’s clear Haley is playing a very dangerous game, opening herself up to attacks from all sides that could cripple any future candidacy.
Phillip Klein is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
