It was only 10 minutes after all the polls closed in New Hampshire that the Associated Press called the race for President Trump.
And yet, during a brief and unhappy period in which the polls showed President Trump up by “only” 7 points (a thrashing in most elections), Ambassador Nikki Haley stood in front of a crowd of supporters and promised that she would continue the race, attacking everything from President Trump’s mental fitness to his electability.
On mental fitness, she implied that President Trump must be facing cognitive decline because he didn’t want to debate her. By this standard, most of America should be worried about their mental faculties, because given the choice, most of America rather not have to deal with hours of Haley’s adolescent cattiness and geographical illiteracy. On electability, she called it one of the “worst kept secrets in politics” that Democrats want a Trump-Biden rematch because President Trump is “the only Republican in the country who Joe Biden can defeat.” Which is obvious nonsense, seeing as President Trump has been outpolling Biden for months now, but we understand Haley’s confusion. Given that most of the people who voted for her in New Hampshire were Democrats and Independents, that might skew any Republican’s view of the electorate.
And speaking of skewed ideas of the electorate, Haley’s campaign manager has released a memo stating that she believes Haley will be competitive in “Virginia, Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Vermont” when Super Tuesday comes along. Which, even if it were true (we highly doubt it), wouldn’t net her a majority of delegates unless the US were to magically shrink to 13 colonies again.
That said, there is something revealing about that list: namely, that Haley’s campaign appears to believe that she will do best in open, or semi-open primaries. That is to say, they think she’ll do best in states where non-Republicans can vote in the Republican primary.
And you know what? On the strength of New Hampshire, they were right. Exit polls showed that President Trump won registered Republicans in the state of New Hampshire by 50 points. Yes, that’s right, if New Hampshire’s primary had been confined solely to registered Republicans, President Trump would’ve walked out with a 50-point lead. And yet, even allowing Haley to inflate her own voter base with people who wouldn’t even vote for her in the general election, she still lost to President Trump by double digits.
Not, of course, that her surrogates will let that humiliating reality stand in the way of a good narrative. Mark Harris, the lead strategist for the Haley-aligned PAC Stand for America, said that the reason President Trump and his supporters reacted negatively to Haley’s second-place finish was because “they do not want to face Nikki over an extended period of time.”
Again, he’s right, but not for the reason he thinks. No, President Trump probably doesn’t want to face Haley for an extended period of time, not because she’s a threat, but because every dollar President Trump spends on defeating her is a dollar he won’t have to defeat Joe Biden. This woman’s campaign is a waste of time and money not just for the poor, benighted members of the Republican donor class who she’s managed to attract, but also for Republicans in general. The only people whose money she’s not actively wasting are her Democratic donors like LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, who most likely sees Haley for what she is: a useful saboteur to drive a wedge into the Republican coalition, and to deplete the party’s resources before their guns can be turned on Joe Biden.
It’s a clever ploy; a nasty one, but a clever one. Which is all the more reason Republicans should refuse to play along. In our dispatch last week on Iowa, we observed that “any serious attempt to justify the mathematical viability of [non-Trump] candidates relies on so much wishful thinking that it inevitably descends into the realm of unintentional standup comedy.” This is doubly so now that it’s clear that even with Democrats and Independents voting, Haley can’t get within double digits of President Trump. Granted, a truly optimistic (read: delusional) person might argue that President Biden bounced back in South Carolina after losing Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada to Bernie Sanders in 2020, but this comparison suffers for three obvious reasons: Firstly, all of the candidates who dropped out between Nevada and South Carolina endorsed Joe Biden, whereas every Republican who’s dropped out so far (except Chris Christie, but who cares) has endorsed Trump. Secondly, Bernie wasn’t clearing 50 percent of the vote even before the race consolidated to two people. And thirdly, the Republican primary is (ironically) more democratic than the Democratic primary, in that there are no “superdelegates” in the Republican primaries who can put their thumb on the scale for the establishment. Too bad, so sad.
Look, Ambassador, we know a girl’s gotta eat, and that hobnobbing with all your fancy megadonors must be an alluring chance to engage in a little live action roleplay as a billionaire, particularly to a poor South Carolina girl. But frankly, if you want to grift off people who are willing to spend outrageous sums of money to enjoy their own fantasies, you should get an OnlyFans account. At least then you’d be providing something of actual value to your paypigs—sorry, donors.
In short, Haley has no chance to win anything, no matter how much the media pretends. But she does have the chance to gum up the works, make President Trump waste money that could be better spent elsewhere, and artificially inflate the size of the constituency for a dead politics which only finds purchase in the richest enclaves of the Acela Corridor. She should be treated as what she is: a puppet for quislings and globalists. She is, and always has been, nothing but an empty suit. Or, perhaps we should say, an empty dress, and not a fancy one.
