Bon Voyage, Nikki Haley!
When Nikki Haley resigned as Governor of South Carolina and took a job in the Trump administration in 2017, most pundits insisted that she was ingeniously placing herself on some sort of political fast track. Palmer Report pointed out that she had instead thrown her career away, because Trump was bound to end up failing, and she’d be stuck having married herself to Trump’s failure.
When it became clear that Donald Trump was on track to lose the 2020 election, there was a lot of speculation that he would replace Mike Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley. This was certainly a possibility, but Trump is usually a man of bluster, not a man of action, so he figured he would have a hard time pulling the trigger on such a risky move. After all, Trump would be risking losing the evangelical vote by dumping Pence, just to chase the women’s vote that isn’t going to be there for him anyway.
Yet with someone as erratic as Trump, there was always the remote possibility that he’d end up making the switch – until now. Earlier today the Republican National Convention formally nominated Mike Pence as its 2020 running mate. If Trump were going to make a move, he’d have made it before Pence was nominated, as doing so would be much harder and much uglier now.
So Nikki Haley is now out in the cold. She won’t be Donald Trump’s 2020 running mate. By 2024, Trump will be in prison, his supporters will have become dejected and resentful over his failure, and Trumpism will be the last thing the Republicans want to hear about. So no, Haley isn’t magically setting herself up to be the 2024 nominee either.
Yet Haley is nonetheless speaking at the Republican National Convention this week. So she’s got to have a genius secret plan, right? No. It’s just that, having thrown her career away by marrying herself to Trump, she now has nowhere else to go. The media thinks Haley is good for ratings, so they keep trying to find ways to prop her up and keep her relevant. But in reality, she threw her career away more stupidly than any major political figure in recent memory.
