When Nikki Haley dropped out of the Republican presidential race this week, you might have assumed she would use her status as the last person standing between Donald Trump and the complete takeover of the GOP to do … something. After all, the whole point of the Haley Project was to offer Republicans an alternative to Trump. And in this, her exit, she might have taken the opportunity to do something — anything — other than render the entire point of her candidacy moot.
She did not.
Haley congratulated Trump and offered up her supporters on a silver platter. “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him,” she said, “and I hope he does that.”
Trump responded by observing that “Nikki Haley got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion.” Which was not exactly an overture to Haley voters, though he did invite them to join him in “the greatest movement in the history of our country.”
In her exit speech, Haley added that, “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now [Trump’s] time for choosing.”
In all, it was a spectacularly anemic entreaty to Trump to woo her people, to make them his, in the name of the conservative cause. But if you look at what Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign was actually about, it was never about taking on Donald Trump — not really.
At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people."
Nikki haley
On its face, it was about courting voters who were dissatisfied with Trump. But it was also about courting Trump voters, too. Over and over again on the campaign trail, Haley told us her thoughts on the Trump presidency: “I personally believe Donald Trump was the right president at the right time,” she’d say. “I agree with a lot of his policies.”
By way of criticism, she would mostly offer this: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”
Rightly or wrongly. As in, maybe all that chaos wasn’t even Trump’s fault! It was clear that Haley wanted to be The Alternative To Trump, but she also wanted to stay in the good graces of the people who supported him, which meant that her candidacy was sort of indecipherable. She was the alternative to someone she couldn’t really bring herself to criticize.
So what was the point?
If there was any certainty in the Haley campaign, it was that President Biden is too old, that he is very bad at his job, and that he had put the country in peril. When NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Haley, “If in the end we have a choice between Trump and Biden, you’re choosing Trump. Is that correct?” Haley responded, “I think Biden’s more dangerous.”
The fantasy here of a different Republican Party — of something other than the darkness that Trump represents — is over.
Haley thought Joe Biden more dangerous for the country than Donald J. Trump — the man with 91 felony counts to his name, the man who has said he will be a dictator on Day One of a second term, who says he will round up tens of thousands of people into camps, and who essentially wants to destroy the geopolitical order.
But to Haley, Joe Biden was the greater danger.
At every juncture when Haley might have said otherwise, she made clear that she is a Republican, a conservative, before anything else. Is it any wonder that she is now offering her supporters to Trump? There was never any other possibility, not really.
And so what we are witnessing is the final capitulation of the Republican Party. The men and women who have been credited — however questionably — with being resistant to Trumpism are finally showing their hand.
On Wednesday, Republican leader and Sen. Mitch McConnell formally endorsed Trump for president. McConnell once explicitly said that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the Jan. 6 insurrection. But that never stopped him from enabling Trump, directly and indirectly, before and after Jan. 6.
McConnell carried out Trump’s bidding when it was convenient, and he avoided comment when it wasn’t — at a time when a critical comment from Republican leadership was very much needed. When asked by a reporter whether he was concerned about the Republican Party’s embrace of Trump after calling him “morally responsible” for Jan. 6, McConnell responded, “We need to be talking about the future and not the past.”
This was his position on any number of norm-shattering moments in the Trump presidency and post-presidency, from the classified documents scandal to the racist names Trump called McConnell’s own wife. To McConnell, turning the other cheek or staying silent became his de facto response.
For years now, Republicans like Haley and McConnell have been touted as holdouts, as members of a Republican Party that was still based in reality, as resistance agents against Trump and the MAGA movement. But Haley and McConnell never actually did anything to stop Trump, because all along, they needed him. Haley wanted to win over Trump’s voters, and McConnell wanted the support of Trump’s allies in Congress.
What’s doubly disappointing in a week like this one is that neither of them actually needs Trump anymore: Haley is leaving politics for the life of a private citizen and McConnell says he will retire from public life at the end of his current term. But still they abide Trump, looking to him as the future of their party.
The fantasy here of a different Republican Party — of something other than the darkness that Trump represents — is over. You may know plenty of people who are Republicans and don’t like Trump. But as far as Republicans in power — the people who could have stopped Trump from the inside and didn’t — now they’re gone.
This is an adapted excerpt from the March 6 episode of “Alex Wagner Tonight.”
