All too late Nikki Haley realized what most observers of the situation already knew. That to beat Trump, you have to go straight through Trump. To be the man, Ric Flair used to say, you’ve got to beat the man. To extend the professional wrestling reference, you have to sucker elbow him in the kidneys; perforate his spleen and, after the thirsty work has been completed, make sure there is no life left in the political corpse. Rabbit punches here will not suffice and neither will jabs. Electoral politics against Trump can only be properly construed under the category of — Thunderdome. To challenge Trump is to enter into the gladiatorial fundament. The nomination is an existential proposition for Donald J. Trump. Like Binyamin Netanyahu and the sordid, disgusting Silvio Berlusconi before him, Trump needs the highest office of the land to serve as leverage against the legal system itself, which is coming up fast and furious against his lawbreaking ass …
Haley and DeSantis made the fatal error of playing it safe, saving their ammunition for one another in the hope that some deus ex machina would arrive in the nick of time, clearing Trump off the battlefield. Legal? Medical? Who knows what goes through the mind of magical thinkers. They campaigned, in other words, softly and on the margins. And by “on the margins,” I mean ignoring the 800-lb primate in the room, or at least not directing any heavy fire against that excitable chimpmanzee in question. But one cannot hope to win enough votes in any state on the margins because there simply aren’t enough anti-Trump Republicans to listen to that messaging.
The height of this idiocy was the CNN primary “debate” between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis in Iowa. Implied but not quite stated in the fiction of this so-called primary debate was the fact that it did not involve the frontrunner who, for all intents and purposes, had all the advantages — organization, cash, endorsements — of an incumbent. How, pray tell, does one hold a relevant Presidential primary debate absent the frontrunner? Sorry CNN, that’s not a debate; that’s also-rans picking each other off for the entertainment of the frontrunner’s campaign team. Has Ted Turner’s venerable network come to this? CNN, in many ways, has been better to the Trump ‘24 campaign, indeed, than Fox. Just wanted to put that out there.
Two things were made clear by this farcical event: One, that the Trump team is far, far more disciplined and effective than it was in its first iteration in 2015. Trump, in 2015, needed the free advertising, so he enthusiastically participated in every debate. Trump, in 2024, does not, despite the fact that he is probably perfectly well-suited and primed to go up against Haley and DeSantis. Instead, however, he stayed on-message and above the fray. He listened to his campaign staff. The Trump team, for example, knew to pivot away from the “retribution” talking point on the eve of the Evangelical heavy Iowa caucuses. Because the teachings of Jesus are antithetical to retribution, not that Haley or DeSantis would have challenged him on this point. But that makes Trump 2.0, in my opinion, even more dangerous.
The second thing made clear by the CNN “debate” in Iowa is that the political real estate in the Republican party to the right of Trump (DeSantis) and to the left of Trump (Haley) is significantly less than that of Trump himself. It is a daunting political mathematics. Trump is the locus of the Republican party, God help us. How does one find the equation of the locus? Because Trump — on rival Fox — drew more viewers than the CNN debate. And the percentages in Iowa and New Hampshire ultimately bore this out. Quod Erat Demonstrandum
Also — one cannot, cannot, cannot in the sanguinary fight against Trump ever give in to fear. And there is much to fear, to be sure. The 2024 primaries recalled to my mind the fear that fighters in the 80s had when going against Mike Tyson. They were defeated against Tyson before the opening bell even rang. I vividly recall as a young man watching the terror of Michael Spinks against Mike Tyson. Spinks’s legs were jellied at the outset; his center of gravity dispersed. That fight — like the 2024 Republican primary season — was over before it began.
And how much more dangerous than 1987 Mike Tyson is Donald Trump? The death threats are real. Shameless people can and will do anything if they know they will not get caught, that’s why they enjoy expanding the parameters of acceptable behavior. There is no bottom to Trump and, in addition to that, he attracts some of the worst human beings alive to his cause of nihilism, mayhem and chaos. His minions have turned “swatting” into a proper candidate for word of the year, 2024. Mitt Romney, the Republican 2012 nominee for President, spends $5,000 a day on security to protect his family, after crossing Trump. Trump clearly exhibits many of the terrifying aspects of Plato’s would-be tyrant. The stench of fear ran through the initial primaries, evidenced by the ridiculous way that DeSantis and Haley campaigned, terrified of making too direct a charge against their political opponent (imagine that). Haley’s inability, particularly, to confront Trump when he got racial was not just a lost opportunity, but a sign of moral decay. John Nichols of The Nation writes:
And Trump didn’t stop there. As Tuesday’s vote approached, he bragged about deliberately mangling Haley’s birth name as part of an effort to suggest there was something foreign about his last viable Republican opponent. Talking about Haley—who was born in South Carolina and has lived there her entire life—Trump actually speculated about “wherever she may come from.” Late last week, he even reposted a false charge that she was ineligible to serve as president because her parents were not US citizens at the time of her birth.
So what was Haley’s response to what is obviously a calculated strategy by Trump?
She described these crude attempts to portray her as some kind of foreigner as “temper tantrums,” said Trump was “insecure,” and concluded, “I don’t sit there and worry about whether it’s personal or what he means.”
Mama says whaaa-a-at?! Let’s be frank here — Trump appealed to the basest, most racist instincts of New Hampshire voters. “Wherever she came from,” is 2024’s “blood coming out of her — wherever.” And as in the case of Megyn Kelly, who is no angel, the frontrunner seems to save his most feral, vicious comments for women. What, truly, is Trump’s problem with women — or is it just, in general, an unholy hatred of anything other than white, rich dudes? It was a moment in which Trump, in diving deep down into the pit of his own shamelessness, exposed the fact that there really is no low to which he cannot sink. His sheer ugliness and the ugliness of the movement which heads was on full display here and Nikki Haley’s response was to describe it as “insecurity.” It was a profound opportunity lost in a state — New Hampshire — that is not particularly Trump country, as I have written before.
Is Nikki Haley going to win? Of course not. The race is over. It was over when Nikki placed third in the Iowa caucuses. Ron DeSantis, bless his shrivelled, dehydrated heart, got the memo and exited stage right. But not before kissing Trump’s ring. The only thing holding Nikki Haley aloft is the donor class. They — the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity — are, so to speak, the wind beneath her wings.
Do we want Nikki Haley to win? Fuck no, keemo sabe! She is, to paraphrase Joy Reid, the joy of the libertarian donor class’s desiring. "Her hawkish, pro business policies speak for your issues, if you're a billionaire, right? She's pro-drilling, pro-military industrial complex, she's also willing to sign a national abortion ban but buries her position in a lot of mealy mouthed answers about ‘consensus.’ In other words, she’s a normie, right wing blank-slate for the donor class.” Positively citric, but an entirely fair characterization. And, to that point, Haley raised over $1 million in the 24 hours following her “victory” speech in New Hampshire. To paraphrase Jon Lovett on Pod Save America, Nikki Haley has given two victory speeches in celebration of two losses.
Niki Haley hustles hard. But don’t hate the player, hate the game. It’s okay that Nikki Haley is just a squirrel trying to get a nut in a racist, isolationist party. That’s not really my twist, but, hey, you do your thing, Nikki Haley! You … do … your … thing.
As darling Nikki goes about her grind, however — and the struggle, dear reader, the struggle is real — that does not mean that her continued, quixotic candidacy cannot be useful towards a greater cause. Our cause. While Nikki chases her Ralph Larenesque American dream of even more prestigious corporate boards and ever higher corporate speaking fees, she serves, unwittingly, a higher purpose. Even as she climbs, she can prove to be a distraction to Trump, living in the sleazy real estate marketers head, rent-free. Drawing Trump off-message — just where we need him: distracted.
Nikki Haley can ignite his temper like no one else can. She can cause him to say things on the campaign trail that he cannot help. Things that prove the calibre of thug that we all know that he is. She can serve as the perfect foil against his election rigging, standing athwart his story, yelling, “Stop! Patriarch!” She can, by nevertheless persisting, show just how much Trump hates women; she can, by simply being, show just how much Trump hates people of color. And as she spends the Spring — and hopefully the Summer — David-ing to his sloppy Goliath, across the Mississippi and through the Sierra Nevada, dividing his electorate as the court verdicts roll in and the level of his moral perversity is reveled.
President Biden, in the meantime, can wait and watch. The President and his own re-election team can see what works, what distracts, what punches land with bad intentions and do lasting damage to the challenger. And when its over and Trump has won the nomination, he will be something less, something strange and awful, better revealed to the public at large. His violence and his corruptions will be laid bare, and all the legal sordidness that he hoped by election rigging to avoid will be seen by all of America. And that horrible sight will be the candidate that faces the rested and ready Biden at Summer’s end in the gladiatorial fundament. Two men will enter and one shall leave. There, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the fate of our democracy will be decided.
So, yes — run, Nikki, run.