Haley Shivs the ‘Haley Republicans’

The avatar of Trump's 2024 GOP holdouts bends the knee.

Gut punch: “Nikki Haley said Wednesday that she will vote for Donald Trump, despite maintaining he has ‘not been perfect’ on many policies.” Politico reports:

During an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington, her first public speaking event since exiting the presidential race in March, Haley said her priorities as a voter are supporting a president who would back America’s allies and hold its enemies accountable, who would secure the border, support ‘capitalism and freedom,’ and who would lower the national debt.

“Trump has not been perfect on these policies. I’ve made that clear many, many times,” Haley said. “But Biden has been a catastrophe.”

As Tim put it yesterday: “If your baseline assumption is that everyone will do the wrong thing you don’t have a capacity for disappointment and can only be pleasantly surprised.” Happy Thursday.

---

Nikki Haley, pictured here in the act of setting her remaining dignity on fire. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.)

Haley on Trump, Then and Now

Of course it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. Nikki Haley’s flip-flops on Trump over the years have been legendary. “When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” the Trump-critic-turned-cabinet-member told Politico after January 6th. “I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. . . . He’s not going to run for federal office again. . . . He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Then, just three months later, she said she’d support him if he did run: “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it.” And a few months after that: “We need him in the Republican party. I don’t want to go back to the days before Trump.”

Even when she reversed herself on that pledge and ran anyway, Haley still didn’t start taking swings at Trump for nearly a year, instead focusing her fire on those closer to her in the polls: Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis.

But then, after Iowa, the rest of the field finally dropped out. It was Haley and Trump, mano a mano. And at long last, she set about making the case: This man is simply unfit to be president again.

A reminder: This was just a few months ago! 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.”

• “Anybody that can’t call out a dictator, that’s a problem. . . . [Putin’s] emboldened by Trump because Trump is not willing to stand up for our allies.”

• “Trump just sided with a thug who kills his political opponents. He just sided with a man who goes and arrests American journalists and holds them hostage. He sided with him over the allies who stood with us at 9/11.”

• “He said that he would stand with Putin and encourage him to invade our allies. . . . Trump would side with a dictator who kills his political opponents. . . . Trump is going to side with a madman who’s made no bones about the fact he wants to destroy America.”

• “This is a man that put us $8 trillion in debt. . . . This is a man who praised China’s President Xi a dozen times after China gave us COVID. This is a man who now wants to go and put 10 percent tariffs across the board, raising taxes on every single American.”

• “He’s just trying to control as much as he can control, but we don’t want a king in America.”

• “Every bit of it is disgusting. To sit there and mock my husband for not being with me on the campaign trail because he is deployed and serving our country. . . . The reality is, the closest [Trump] has come to harm’s way is a golf ball hitting him on a golf cart.”

• “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.”

On the campaign trail, it seemed as though these attacks intensified as it was becoming clear she has absolutely no path to victory in the primary. She stuck it out all the way through Super Tuesday, plainly relishing the opportunity to hold nothing back. Even when she finally dropped out, she pointedly refused to endorse Trump: “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party who did not support him, and I hope he does,” she said in her concession speech. “This is now his time for choosing.”

Well. Now comes Haley to the stage at the Hudson Institute yesterday: “I will be voting for Trump. Having said that, I stand by what I said in my suspension speech: Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me. And not assume that they’re just gonna be with him. And I genuinely hope he does that.”

It’s amusing to imagine what action Trump took in the intervening months that Haley tells herself was enough to win her over. Repeatedly violating his gag order in his New York trial, perhaps? Accusing Joe Biden of trying to have him assassinated? Insisting additional aid to Ukraine be structured in the form of a loan?

For his part, Trump so far hasn’t even acknowledged Haley’s prostration—busy as he’s been barking about Jack Smith and his “Team of Political Hacks and Thugs.” I assume he’ll get around to the obligatory head pat sometime today. That is, if he doesn’t decide to give her the Bill Barr treatment.

One other thing bears saying. Haley likes to talk about her people—“the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me.”

Obviously we’ve all been doing this for months: considering the electoral ramifications of the “Haley Republicans.”

But of course this term was in some ways a misnomer. Many “Haley Republicans” weren’t really Haley Republicans in the ordinary sense, in that they didn’t necessarily fully share her view of the world or her politics.

Many “Haley Republicans” spent last year rolling their eyes at the cynical game she was playing, going after DeSantis hammer and tongs while ignoring Trump altogether for months. Many of them had no trouble remembering her hilariously checkered history on the Trump question.

But you know what? For a minute this year, she won those people over anyway. Because for a minute, when she got into that one-on-one with Trump, she actually seemed to be saying: Forget the consequences, I’m going to tell you how I really feel about the guy.

That’s what those people—that quarter or so of the party—were pulling the lever for. That’s what they kept pulling the lever for, in state after state, even after it was obvious it was a hopeless endeavor. Even after she dropped out! The “Haley Republicans” coalition wasn’t forged by stupid canned lines about how kicks hurt worse when you’re wearing heels. It wasn’t even forged by appreciation for Haley’s serious foreign policy views. “Haley Republicans” became a thing because, for a few months this year, Haley, uniquely among the top brass of the Republican party, was willing to step forward and tell the truth about Donald Trump.

That energy is still there—those voters are still there—but the coalition is gone now. “Haley Republicans” as a bloc ceased to exist when Nikki Haley took to the Hudson Institute stage to bend the knee.

—Andrew Egger

---

---

‘She’s Going to Keep Her Options Open’

Tim’s video analysis of Haley’s remarks yesterday is well worth your time today as well:

---

Quick Hits: About That Deadly-Force Policy

Yesterday, we wrote at some length about Donald Trump’s latest insane accusation against Joe Biden, who he now says tried to have him assassinated via the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago for improperly retained classified documents last year. Over at Just Security, Asha Rangappa and Tom Joscelyn have a bunch more background on the Justice Department deadly-force policy at the core of this supposed dastardly plot: 

Most people will not be surprised to know that the FBI, like other law enforcement agencies, is authorized to use deadly force. FBI Special Agents—so named because of the “special” arrest powers that were granted to them in the early part of the twentieth century shortly after J. Edgar Hoover created the agency—are trained in the Justice Department’s deadly force policy almost daily while at the FBI Academy in Quantico. In fact, most newly-minted agents will be able to recite the first portion of the policy by heart: “[The FBI] may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer believes that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person.” . . .

Agents’ ability to apply these restrictions, in real time, fast-moving, and changing circumstances, are tested in various ways at Quantico, such as firearms training simulators (large video screens playing out scenarios that change depending on the agent’s actions and reactions), with actors in Hogan’s Alley, the Academy’s tactical training facility, and in extended reviews and discussions of case studies with FBI attorneys. There are a few red lines that can get new agents kicked out of training, and a failure to understand and apply the restrictions on the use of deadly force is certainly one of them.

Setting forth these limitations on the use of force has been standard operating procedure since the FBI’s internal investigation into the use of deadly force at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, which resulted in the deaths of Vicki Weaver and her 14 year-old son, Sammy. In that raid, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) developed a tactical operations plan that included specially drafted “Rules of Engagement,” which were not approved by FBI Headquarters. According to the FBI after action report, “These rules instructed the HRT snipers that before a surrender announcement was made, they could and should shoot all armed adult males appearing outside the cabin.” The report went on to find that “[c]ertain portions of these Rules not only departed from the FBI’s standard deadly force policy but also contravened the Constitution of the United States,” and that the Rules “may have created an atmosphere that encouraged the use of deadly force thereby having the effect of contributing to an unintentional death.”

Reiterating the deadly force policy in all operation plans therefore ensures that there is no departure from the narrow conditions under which such force is authorized. (In the FBI search and arrest teams on which one of the authors participated, the team leader read the deadly force policy out loud before the start of every operation.) There is no such thing as “just” a search warrant with zero risk, and these policies are in place to minimize escalation. The possibility of a search going awry is not merely speculative for the agents of the Miami division: In that division, the same one that executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, two FBI agents, Special Agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, were shot and killed in 2021 while attempting to execute a search warrant. In short, there was nothing unusual, out of protocol, or unnecessary about the reiteration of the DOJ deadly force policy in the Mar-a-Lago search plan, and it existed to explicitly remind agents of the need to exercise caution and restraint in situations where agents may need to react to unforeseen circumstances.

Read the whole thing.

---

Cheap Shots