Nikki Haley and the End of the Anti-Trump Republican Fantasy

While Nikki Haley’s announcement that she’d be voting for Donald Trump was quite predictable, it has really upset a lot of people who imagined they saw in her some surviving strain of Never Trump Republicanism. Andrew Egger of The Bulwark professes not to be surprised, but he sure is angry:

You might have butter in your fridge you bought when Haley was talking like this:

“He’s totally unhinged.”

“If you are going to hit our military, you are not qualified to be president, period.”

“If you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s license, let alone being president of the United States …”

“Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We cannot win a general election that way.”

“Every single thing that Donald Trump has said or put on TV has been a lie.”

Of course, a lot of Republican leaders who now treat the 45th president with virtual reverence have said these sorts of things about him (in public, no less; you can only guess what they’ve said and may still be saying privately). The list includes Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Doug Burgum, Rand Paul, and many more. They have all fallen on their knees before Trump, so why wouldn’t Haley? After all, one of the few prominent Republicans who can’t bring himself to eat his bitter words about Trump, Mitch McConnell, has nonetheless announced he’ll vote for the man who has insulted him repeatedly and made racist comments about his wife.

There is no longer an anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party that will somehow miraculously spring back into power when the 45th president finally goes away. So of course anyone who imagines themselves as having a future in the GOP is going to support its reigning king and three-time presidential nominee.

This was a no-brainer move for Nikki Haley in particular. The two things we know most infallibly about her are (1) she is very ambitious and confident about her political skills, which is why she ran for president in 2024, when almost no one thought she’d be the last Trump rival standing; and (2) she has shown no inhibitions about repeatedly flip-flopping in her views on the 45th president, denouncing him in scathing terms and then backing him to the hilt. Running directly against him in the early 2024 primaries, she flipped her past praise of Trump and went after him hammer and tongs. Now, after the briefest of decent intervals, she’s flopped right back onto his bandwagon. Indeed, the speed with which she fell into line could even revive her otherwise remote chance of becoming The Boss’s running-mate and heir, assuming she flip-flops as well on her refusal to even consider the gig and he stops calling her “Bird Brain.”

In backing Trump, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations is no better or worse than all the other Republicans who have lacked the ability or the will to direct their party away from the former president’s crude authoritarianism and knuckle-dragger policy views. Perhaps she’s partially responsible for creating the momentary illusion that pre-Trump Republicanism had a tangible constituency and a vibrant future. That’s a fantasy that really needs to die. Nikki Haley may have dealt it the final blow.