The delusion is strong with this one. A report on Saturday indicates that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, mired around 3% in GOP Presidential Primary polls, looks ready to launch a quixotic bid next month for the Oval Office anyway.
David Drucker, a writer for The Dispatch, claims Haley’s senior aides are prepared to assume essential campaign roles once Haley gives the green light. She already possesses the necessary infrastructure thru her prominent political action committee and political nonprofit to build a ground game and campaign operation.
Should Haley launch a bid for president as expected, such a move would mark a broken promise to former President Donald Trump. Haley had previously promised to defer to Trump if he wanted to run for re-election.
Here is the story from The Dispatch:
Nikki Haley is planning to challenge Donald Trump for supremacy atop the Republican Party—and she could make her 2024 presidential bid official as soon as next month.
Haley possesses the architecture of a robust White House campaign operation through the Stand For America political action committee and Stand For America, a 501(c)(4) policy-focused political nonprofit organization. Trusted senior aides are already on board, prepared to step into positions directing political strategy, fundraising, communications, grassroots outreach, and policy development.
“She’s definitely positioned to launch,” Dave Wilson, president of the Palmetto Family Council in Columbia, South Carolina, said of the 51-year-old former United States ambassador to the United Nations. “The rocket is fueled and ready. I think we’re just in the countdown now.”
Haley—whose extensive resume features a term-and-a-half as governor of South Carolina, a crucial early primary state—also comes to the 2024 contest with a turnkey campaign message.
In 2016, Haley prepared for a predicted Trump loss to Hillary Clinton with a statement that read, in part: “After three consecutive presidential defeats, my fellow Republicans must make changes.” As I reported in In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP, the idea was to establish the then-governor as a national figure who could resuscitate a party beset by turmoil.
It’s not all that different today, on the heels of three disappointing elections with Trump at the helm of the Republican Party. “We have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. It’s time we bring in a new generation,” she said to Fox News’ Bret Baier earlier this month. Past, meet prologue.
Republican insiders in South Carolina who have closely tracked her career, as well as national party operatives keeping tabs on 2024, say several factors are motivating Haley’s early move. Chief among them: reconnecting with grassroots conservatives at home in South Carolina, the state that votes third on the GOP presidential nominating calendar and the first state to vote in the heavily Republican South.
Left unsaid in the Dispatch piece is Haley’s capricious and calculating personality has already destroyed her credibility with the Republican base.
Back in 2016, she endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for president right before the South Carolina Primary and said this during a rally for the Florida senator:
“Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in Kindergarten.”
But after he won the Presidency, Haley managed to con her way into the UN Ambassadorship position. She served for two years before departing after the Democrats won the 2018 midterm elections.
After the 2020 election, Haley gave a now-infamous interview to Politico proclaiming Trump’s political career over weeks after the January 6, 2021 protest at the U.S. Capitol. Here are her money quotes regarding Trump:
“I think he’s going to find himself further and further isolated. I think his business is suffering at this point. I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. I think he’s lost his social media, which meant the world to him. I mean, I think he’s lost the things that really could have kept him moving.”
“He’s not going to run for federal office again.”
“We need to acknowledge he let us down. 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.”
She later pathetically begged to meet with Trump to atone after he recovered politically. Trump declined her entreaty.
Despite her low poll numbers, Haley could secure financial support from a handful of neocon Republican billionaires and perhaps Democrats to keep her presidential fantasy alive for several months. The Gateway Pundit previously reported GOP billionaires Paul Singer, Miriam Adelson, and Stanley Drukenmiller all gave to Stand For America, Inc. back in 2019. A wealthy Democratic couple, Vivek and Lakshmi Garipalli made a huge $1 million donation as well.
One can only hope they are not foolish enough to light their money on fire like the Joker in The Dark Knight. The sooner Haley’s political career flames out, the better.