Nikki Haley Cleaned House Wednesday Night
Notes on a Strong Early Showing from the Most Neoliberal No-Nonsense Republican Candidate, Firm, Tough, Brutally Honest— but is the Republican Base too Fragile for it?
“When politics becomes entertainment, it’s very easy to create a land of make-believe in which you get high on your own supply. To follow Trump, you more or less have to say farewell to the actual world and live by the rules of the fun house carnival. Haley seems to have her feet still planted on the ground — able to face what Saul Bellow once called “the reality situation.” — “Nikki Haley is the Best Trump Alternative,” David Brooks ~ The New York Times
On a stage nearly full of old conservative men all uniformly attired in blue blazars and red ties, consumed with pride and vanity trading insults— a distinguished-looking poised, half Indian woman in a white jacket, dishing out Margaret Thatcher quotes and defense budget figures, stood out.
Francis Chung Politico
In her dispatch from the primary debate for the Free Press, Olivia Reingold observes,
The only candidate who came out looking stronger from the debate was Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, looked and sounded presidential, and ripped into Ramaswamy, saying he lacked “moral clarity” and was choosing a murderer— Russian president Vladimir Putin— over the forces of democracy.
Win Mcnamee Getty Images
You Call Yourselves Conservatives?
Indeed, Haley crushed it the other night. She couldn’t have done better from her opening spiel where she blasted all the members of her own party for approving gargantuan spending packages during the Trump years, underscoring it was Republicans who approved that spending. Republicans…
No one expecting her to revolt against her own party like that, and considering that some of Trump’s fiscal enablers shared the stage with her, the looks on Christie’s and Pence’s faces were priceless. And this moment came right on the heels of Christie and Pence each griping about Biden’s stimuluses. When the moderator got around to Haley, declining even to criticize Bidenomics—that would be too easy— she said, what about you guys who approved Trump’s spending of $8 trillion? The Washington Post wrote yesterday morning,
Over nearly the whole first hour of the two-hour debate, Trump was invoked substantially only by one candidate, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who lumped him in with other Republicans onstage whom she accused of spending irresponsibly.
“The truth is that Biden didn’t do this to us. Our Republicans did this to us when they passed that $2.2 trillion covid stimulus bill,” Haley said. She mentioned her opponents’ votes to raise the debt ceiling and added, “Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt, and our kids are never going to forgive us for this.”
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board says,
Ms. Haley’s honesty didn’t stop there. “Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt,” she said. “You look at the 2024 budget: Republicans asked for $7.4 billion in earmarks. Democrats asked for $2.8 billion. So you tell me who are the big spenders.” Those figures are backed by a Roll Call story last month: “House Republicans have so thoroughly stacked the earmarking deck in their favor in appropriations bills for the upcoming fiscal year that the top Democratic recipient doesn’t even appear in the top 60.”
Even my progressive mom cheered her for having the courage to lift the veil on the GOP’s hypocrisy. From that tasteful broadside, to the even more noble moment where she excoriated Ramaswamy for the idiocy of his “America first” foreign policy views—his views to cut funding to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel— I thought it said something that even that very Trump-friendly crowd was so emphatic in their admiration that Ramaswamy was forced to stand there smiling like an idiot before he could respond to her assault. She summed up, Vivek “has no foreign policy experience, and it shows…”
Brian Snyder Reuters
Indeed, besides being a disgrace to conservatives as well as the American republic last night, Vivek’s foreign policy views were as usual grating to listen to. In case you weren’t familiar with him, this guy is a downright fucking ignorant stupid, callous son of a bitch who on Bari Weiss’s podcast recently called Zelensky and Putin two morally equivalent “thugs” squabbling over territory. He also said it’s only in America’s interest to support Taiwan until we achieve “semiconductor independence.” Predictably he is also one of those absurd conservatives who thinks we should invade Mexico to bomb drug cartels over drug addicts, addicted to fentanyl. Because some sad morons willfully take drugs they know might kill them and then die, some America firsters think this makes drug cartels the equivalent of “terrorist organizations.” Vivek is one of these America first GOP monsters of vanity who argues we need to pull out of every overseas “entanglement” to secure our border. Yeah like illegal immigrants, many of them moms and kids, and a handful of drug smugglers, pose a bigger threat to America than China’s military build up, Russia’s empire-building, North Korea’s ballistic missiles, or Iran’s ICBM’s. Hardly anything except for the whining about “offshoring” and “working class wages” makes me as irate. But Nikki Haley was having none of it. And when you reflect on Haley’s record on human rights, being the only one in the Trump administration to publicly denounce China’s human rights abuses against the Uighur minority in Xinjiang, and recently slamming Trump for kissing up to Putin, Kim Jong Un and Xi—making that a staple of her campaign—it’s unsurprising that Ramaswamy’s attention-seeking provocations would incense the principled former UN ambassador.
Alex Wroblewski/ Agence France Presse/ Getty Images
After praising her realism on the abortion issue—she doesn’t think there should be a federal law, because it’s impractical, it will never happen—Noah Rothman recaps this glorious exchange in National Review,
If Haley had a “moment,” it occurred during a heated exchange with Vivek Ramaswamy. According to the 38-year-old political newcomer, foreign policy is easy. Someone possessed of his cleverness and “courage” can hack and, subsequently, defuse the great-power competition that has defined relations between states since the Peloponnesian War. Ramaswamy’s latest big idea involves convincing Ukraine to cede to Russia the territory that Russia is attempting to seize by force. That would somehow convince Moscow to abandon the commercial, diplomatic, and military ties it has cultivated with Beijing. European battlefields would be pacified, America’s European allies would be secure, and China would be deterred, Ramaswamy’s magical thinking posits. All that is required of us is to appease a land-hungry despot by cajoling a partner nation into surrendering its people to violence and subjugation. Haley was having none of it.
Haley deconstructed Ramaswamy’s untested assumptions. The pharmaceuticals billionaire insists that the U.S. has given too much support for Ukraine’s sovereignty compared with Europe. But Haley noted that, in terms of individual gross domestic product, eleven European states have provided Kyiv with more material support than has the U.S. Ramaswamy claims the Sino-Russian partnership is an outgrowth of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, and the U.S. only cements that relationship by opposing Russia’s irridentism. Haley demonstrated that this de facto alliance began far earlier and, because geopolitics is a zero-sum game, China’s interests are advanced if Russia successfully subsumes Ukraine into its orbit and destabilizes the NATO frontier. But Haley delivered the coup de grâce when she confronted Ramaswamy with the logic of his “one easy trick” approach to foreign policy.
Haley attacked Ramaswamy for advertising his intention to sacrifice Taiwan to China’s ambitions once we have secured the American interests under Taipei’s protection. She savaged him for his desire to dissolve and reconstitute the existing military-to-military relations between the U.S. and Israel. She battered him for his rediscovery of and advocacy for appeasement as means of pacifying land-hungry despots. And when Ramaswamy accused Haley of arguing in bad faith and only for personal financial gain, Trump’s former United Nations ambassador pounced. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows!” she remarked to loud and sustained applause from the Republican audience.
She even earned praise from the Never Trump—which I would describe as very Haley-critical—Bulwark podcast. Charlie Sykes in his morning newsletter admits,
For most of the night, Vivek seemed to dominate the debate.
Until he was utterly and thoroughly gutted by Nikki Haley
Last year, I wrote about “The Unbearable Lightness of Nikki,” but last night, the former South Carolina governor impressively overperformed. On issue after issue — spending, abortion, Ukraine, and Trump’s electability — she was serious, sober, and substantive. If Vivek won the MAGA primary debate; Haley, arguably, won the Normie/Donor debate — and she’s likely to get a serious second look.
I admit even being a Haley supporter, I was not expecting her to come out all guns blazing like that. I wasn’t sure I would even watch the debate. I was afraid it would be a demoralizing spectacle of self-seeking losers insulting each other. I was afraid Haley would get drowned out in the dumb ruckus, and it would have been another depressing minor chapter in our debased contemporary politics. But Haley showed the Republican party, the media and America what a serious neoliberal Republican president would look like. Strident, sober, sensible, steady, confident, courageous and confrontational, I am not sure we deserve her. But she deserves to be the next executive. I already knew she does, but she couldn’t have better publicly made the case the other night that she has America’s finances, interests, and values all at heart.
And as Joe Biden betrayed the country first by giving away Afghanistan to terrorists, then lining consumers’ pockets with free money, igniting the worst inflation in forty years, dropping $6 trillion on the debt like it was nothing, and now rewarding Iran on the brink of a nuclear break out, with $6 billion in unfrozen assets, while absurdly seeking detente with China over climate change, not to mention perhaps dooming Ukraine’s counteroffensive by having held off on fighter planes for too long, and continuing to withhold ATACM’s, Biden was not the moderate he ran as in 2020. Biden is a Bernie Sanders/ AOC/ Elizabeth Warren Green New Deal liberal. He is a socialist. He is also a serial appeaser, who in keeping with the Obama doctrine of radical self-loathing, assumes that if America is nice to the bad guys, it will mollify them, rather than encourage them. And besides Biden, abhorrently the Democratic party offers no alternative. Indeed a Gavin Newsom or a Kamala Harris would likely be worse than Joe Biden, although it’s hard to imagine how things could conceivably get worse. But just think of our adversaries becoming more emboldened, while gas prices jump higher as progressives pursue an insane academic foreign policy of anti-imperialism or postcolonialism, and similarly continue their Marxist campaign in the schools to reeducate kids along the lines of their identities and historical racial backgrounds; and ban gas appliances in every new building and forego prosecuting felonies to subject vulnerable people and businesses to violent crime and extortion in the name of antiracism.
The Democratic party under the radical revisionism of their woke religious philosophy, and the social leveling and bottom-up restructuring of modern society that it demands, has embraced an ideology that defies scientific truth and practical reality, where 2 plus 2 equals five basically, and evinces the worst contempt for humanity in the presumption to subordinate the free rights-bearing individual to unfounded, self-serving critical race and gender theory and the redistributive economics of rent control and “equity,” and attempting to nationalize college by “cancelling” student debt. On their terms if they were to go all the way to enact their agenda, the woke might succeed in systematically eradicating racism and privilege and gender norms, and completely ending the use of carbon, and using the blunt power of the state to guarantee you an infantilizing education in “graphic design,” “business management” or “women’s studies.” But what fucking difference would it make if we we all became poor, the price of heat, gas and air conditioning were unaffordable, and everyone became a victim of crime, and either America were to become San Francisco or Portland Oregon, or a liberal arts college where harmful speech is punished by administrative bureaucracy and no one really learns anything, despite the sacred importance of a college education as the universal ticket to enlightenment?
And though much of the Republican party might still be under the sway of Trump’s corrosive cult of personality, I can’t overemphasize, for the insanity of their ideological capture, the Democratic party is no better. Under Biden particularly we slouched towards defaulting on our debt, and Fitch downgraded our borrowing credibility from triple A to double A plus, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, and Russian invaded Ukraine— for God’s sake. Because both parties have each become corrupted by various forms of cultural totalitarianism, this is all why it is urgent to be on the look out for individuals with the power to reverse America’s decline as an economy, as a free society, and the world’s police. There is no one else than Nikki Haley who I feel confident would restore America’s superpower status. It’s high time to get real before China invades Taiwan, and Biden unveils a new spending package and piles on any more regulations.
Wake up.
— Jay