When Nikki Haley summoned the national media to Greenville, South Carolina, on Tuesday, she did something strikingly unusual even in this most bizarre election campaign. She devoted an entire speech to explaining why she didn’t drop out of the presidential race.
Hungry for attention and tired of answering questions about why she didn’t read the room and the polls, her team had tantalizingly billed the event as a “State of the Race” speech. There was widespread speculation among Republican strategists that she might finally be coming to terms with reality. Perhaps, the theory went, Ms. Haley now understood that absent an unforeseen act of God, there was no mathematical way for her to win enough delegates to wrest the Republican nomination from Donald J. Trump.
“Some of you — maybe some of you in the media — came here today to see if I would drop out of the race,” Ms. Haley said. “Well, I’m not. Far from it.”
Her smile said it all. Ms. Haley was having fun, finally able to say what she had long thought about Mr. Trump and seemed pleased that her message had garnered national attention. She looked like a woman who didn’t have much to lose, which those close to her said was entirely true.
Ms. Haley says she wants nothing from Mr. Trump. After serving as ambassador to the United Nations, she was not tempted by any Cabinet role to make a deal with him to end her quixotic campaign.
“Some people always said I was running because I really wanted to be vice president,” she said in her speech Tuesday. “I think I’ve clarified that question pretty well.”
It’s hard to find a Republican lawmaker or activist who isn’t privately speculating about Ms. Haley’s ulterior motives. Will she remain as a Plan B candidate in the event that Mr. Trump dies or goes to prison? Is she positioning herself as the woman who will lead a post-Trump Republican Party — the fortune teller who warned that Mr. Trump would lose again so she can come back in 2028 and say, “I told you so”?
Ms. Haley dismissed such speculation on Tuesday: “If I had run for the wrong reason, I would have dropped out a long time ago.”
She said she was “used to people questioning my intentions” and that she “fights for what I believe is right.”
Their friends and allies say that the prophets of doom have unusually little influence over them. Because of her history of winning long races, she is used to being counted out and proving people wrong. Ms. Haley sometimes wears a T-shirt on the campaign trail with the slogan “Underestimate me. That will be fun.”
She was a young, first-time candidate who found herself far behind in the polls and fundraising when she defeated a nearly 30-year incumbent for a seat in the South Carolina State House in a comeback victory that shocked her state’s political establishment . Years later, in 2010, she defeated a number of the state’s political heavyweights in her race for governor: Henry McMaster, a former attorney general who is now governor; Gresham Barrett, then a popular congressman; and André Bauer, then the state’s deputy governor. The same establishment is now opposing them almost across the board in support of Mr. Trump.
One of those losing former rivals, Mr. Barrett, said in an interview Tuesday that Ms. Haley appeared at a fundraiser this week in front of many of the “movers” in the Spartanburg, South Carolina, area and “had no concerns.” ” that she was in the race for the long haul.
“I don’t think any supporter stuck around last night thinking this was a short-term thing,” Barrett said, adding that her donors have expressed a willingness to stick with her through Super Tuesday — and until to the end, whenever that may be.
Ms. Haley has told donors and friends that the personal attacks she has received from Mr. Trump and his allies have only strengthened her resolve. Far-right activist Laura Loomer, who accompanied Mr. Trump on his plane for a recent trip to South Carolina, brutally attacked Ms. Haley’s 22-year-old son Nalin and even questioned his parentage.
At a recent rally, Mr. Trump wondered aloud why Ms. Haley’s husband, Michael, did not accompany her on the campaign trail. Ms. Haley responded curtly that her husband served overseas in the military — an act of service that Mr. Trump never performed and that he could never understand. The emotional aftershocks came through in her speech on Tuesday. Ms. Haley choked up as she said how much she wished she and her children could be with him.
Ms. Haley explained her decision to stay in the race as a matter of principle. She pointed out that most Americans are unhappy with her two likely choices in the fall. She said the country deserved better than these two old men and that she was determined to give voters that choice. Leaving the process so early, she said, would leave Americans with the longest general election cycle in history – one that would result in a chaotic future for the country regardless of the outcome.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said in a statement to The New York Times: “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley still cannot name a state she believes she can win.” He said Ms. Haley was ” the candidate of choice for Democrats and never Trump supporters who still suffer from Trump Deangement Syndrome.”
During the Trump era, Ms. Haley was not exactly known for taking a principled stand against the former president. During the 2016 election campaign, she made it clear what she thought of the man. She thought he was morally unfit for the presidency – “everything we teach our children not to do in kindergarten.” But then she voted for him, served under him and praised him effusively. She even went so far as to suggest that his childish insults against North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – Mr Trump called him “little rocket man” – were having an impact.
After the Jan. 6 insurrection, Ms. Haley flirted with abandoning Mr. Trump again. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have taken, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him,” she told Politico. “And we can’t let that happen again.”
Two months later, she said she would resign and support Mr. Trump if he ran again in 2024. People close to Ms. Haley said they simply didn’t think he would run again. Shortly after he announced his candidacy, she went back on her word, saying that the country had only slipped downwards and that his survival was “bigger than just one person.”
For much of this campaign, Ms. Haley dealt with Mr. Trump sparingly. So easily, in fact, that Mr. Trump was seriously considering her as a potential candidate for the candidacy by early in the new year, according to three people with direct knowledge of his deliberations. Ms. Haley and her allies have devoted almost all their energy and money to destroying Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and clearing the rest of the field for a two-person race against Mr. Trump.
In recent weeks, Ms. Haley has finally let loose on Mr. Trump.
She has portrayed him as a sycophant of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and urged him to say that Mr. Putin was responsible for the death of dissident Aleksei Navalny in a remote prison. She has criticized Mr. Trump for spending more time and money in court than on the campaign trail and has attacked him for increasing his influence on the Republican National Committee, claiming he wants it to be “his piggy bank for his personal interests.” Cases”.
Her campaign is sounding more and more like the strident anti-Trump campaign of Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who denigrated and mocked the front-runner at every opportunity. After Mr. Trump released his latest moneymaker — gold sneakers with a Trump logo — Ms. Haley’s campaign criticized the announcement, posting an image on social media of a white sneaker emblazoned with the Russian flag.
Whatever their motivations, there are other, more prosaic justifications for continuing the fight a little longer, until Super Tuesday on March 5th.
Kevin Madden, a former Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 and 2008 presidential campaigns, said this campaign helped Ms. Haley raise her national profile and build a transferable infrastructure, relationships and “muscle memory” should she decide should decide to try again. He argued that not even a Mr. Trump endorsement from Haley would “completely undo” her because voters have short memories.
There is one final factor. Ms. Haley has benefited from a self-renewing assembly line of wealthy anti-Trump donors who are happy to continue funding what some privately admit is a futile effort.
“Candidates have no shortage of reasons to run,” Mr. Madden said. “They’re running out of resources.”
Ms. Haley has many of them.
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2024-02-21 18:50:18
www.nytimes.com
