She can’t restore sanity to the GOP. No candidate can.
Nikki Haley, one of the many Republicans who swore to stop Donald Trump in 2016 and then became a loyal supporter, is now running against Trump. Her campaign is already a collection of meaningless platitudes and she is unlikely to win, but she is the essential example of why the current GOP cannot be trusted with power.
Back in 2016, the then–South Carolina governor made a number of excellent points about why Donald Trump was unfit for public office. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” she said at a Marco Rubio rally seven years ago this month. (Yes, a Marco Rubio rally. Such things once existed.) “That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.”
But it’s who Nikki Haley was, at least for a while. We might attribute some of her later cringe-inducing sycophancy for Trump to her position in his White House, but even after the January 6 insurrection, as the former Republican operative Stuart Stevens noted recently, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” In late 2021, months after the Capitol attack, she said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham, but she’s certainly putting in the effort.
