DAVID KRAYDEN: Nikki Haley is the new Liz Cheney

Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy both famously and infamously declared Nikki Haley to be “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.” But Ramaswamy dropped out of the nomination race while former U.N. ambassador and mouthpiece for the Military Industrial Complex Haley is still in their pitching. 

But her game is not about winning but about making victory for former President Donald Trump as agonizing, painful and embarrassing as possible. 

Dick Cheney? Hell, Haley is another LIz Cheney – a RINO obsessed with taking down Trump and advancing the gilded but bloodied racket of the defense contractors who are committed to committing you and the United States to any foreign war anytime as long as they provide the munitions. The problem remains that ultimately, Americans will be providing their children, their husbands, their sons, their mothers and daughters to those foreign wars and they will be coming back in body bags or as wounded warriors who become homeless veterans. 

Haley has built her nomination campaign on this cycle of carnage and destruction. She has been the Republican candidate most willing to pledge America’s undying devotion to the corrupt government in Ukraine; on the need to continue to send billions of unaccountable dollars to the roving clown in the army costume, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who rules like a petty dictator but is rewarded with mammoth donations. 

Ramaswamy, in a presidential debate, exposed all of this about Haley in a marvelous but one-sided exchange last December in Tuscaloosa, AL. 

"I don’t have a woman problem," Ramaswamy said. "You have a corruption problem and I think that that's what people need to know. Nikki is corrupt."

"This is a woman who will send your kids to die so she can buy a bigger house," he declared.

On his notepad, Ramaswamy had written “Nikki = corrupt.” 

Haley didn’t respond to Ramaswamy. She declared that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. 

But how could she deny her connections to the arms manufacturers – or that of her husband?

Haley doesn’t care if 31,000 Ukrainians have died in the war with Russia or even if it’s more like 300,000 or even 500,000 – Zelenskyy would not have to be drafting 45-year-olds into the army if his losses were as low as he insists. 

Her campaign is still in forward, even after she lost the primary to former President Donald in South Carolina, her home state where she was the governor who denied history and took down the Confederate flag at the state capitol in 2015.  

She was appointed by Trump as United States Ambassador to the United Nations but left politics in 2018. Since then, her personal fortune has risen from $1 million to $8 million. She has amassed that money in the usual manner that former politicians often do – by sitting on the boards of corporations or through speaking engagements where people and organizations bewilderingly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hear her speak about the same subject matter, on which she has nothing original or particularly interesting to offer. 

She has offered more of the same as a Republican presidential candidate, suggesting that Trump is unfit for office, can’t win against Biden and would usher in an era of “chaos.”

As she prepares for another shellacking on Super Tuesday and having just lost the financial backing of the Koch Network, it is more than appropriate to wonder just why she is continuing to stay in a race that she cannot win and one in which her very presence guarantees her continued alienation from the Republican base.

The answer is quite simple: she is not working for the Republican base but for the Deep State establishment that wants the United States to get back into the fight – any fight. She is laboring for a position and a voice in any potential Democratic administration that would more accurately reflect her views and opinions than any Trump administration would. She is fighting for her defense contractors who are scared as hell that Trump is going to win re-election and shut down this foreign war charade that continues to generate their billions and trillions of dollars in revenue. Haley is the last, best hope in the Republican Party for these amoral, uncaring monsters. 

Trump’s greatest failing as president was not that he was vindictive – though he certainly can be that in his personal life – but because he did not effectively assess the danger and insidious power of the intelligence, judicial and defense structures that immediately sought to remove Trump from power. He, much like President John F. Kennedy did, really thought the elected officials were in control and that the bureaucracy would actually listen when the commander-in-chief gave an order.

That bureaucracy, like a massive barnacle on American democracy, did pay attention, but it did not obey. And when Trump declared that foreign wars were a terrible distraction for America, they decided it was time for him to go.

They don’t want him back now but how they would love to work with a lackey like Haley.

U.S. State Department Under Secretary Victoria Nuland is one of the faces of that bureaucracy. She represented the Uniparty in Washington for decades, fomenting war and conflict at every opportunity. She recently stated that the House of Representatives will come back from its break and happily dispense billions to Ukraine after its members think about all those well-paying jobs in the defense industry. 

Nuland is certainly not the most appealing front for the Military Industrial Complex, in either a literal or figurative sense.

Haley makes a better spokeswoman.

But she is not a spokeswoman for grassroots Republicans and the only reason this narcissistic woman is staying in the race is to maximize any damage she is inflicting upon Trump and the GOP. 

She could easily work with President Joe Biden or whomever the Democrats decide to replace him with.

But Haley will always be working against Donald Trump.