“If I needed to pick up the phone and say, ‘This is what I’m going to do. Are you good with this?’ we kind…
“If I needed to pick up the phone and say, ‘This is what I’m going to do. Are you good with this?’ we kind of partnered in that. He would ratchet up the rhetoric, and then I’d go back to the ambassadors and say, ‘You know, he’s pretty upset. I can’t promise you what he’s going to do or not, but I can tell you if we do these sanctions, it will keep him from going too far,’” Haley said in the interview.
“I was trying to get the job done, and I got the job done by being truthful but also by letting him be unpredictable and not showing our cards,” she said.
Haley provided one of the most straightforward examples of the “good cop, bad cop” strategy in recent memory, as Today show interviewer Craig Melvin pointed out. She also endorsed unpredictability, which might be described as the core principle of Trumpism. Trump himself is partial to phrasing this as his willingness to “walk away from bad deals” and “put everything on the table.
