Here’s how Nikki Haley ‘stuck her landing’
The legendary and onceagain astonishing Simone Biles speeds forward, feet barely touching the light blue mat. She leaps. And as the lithe athlete in pink is airborne, CBS News anchor Norah O’donnell tells us we will be witnessing “something … she hasn’t done since suffering a bout of the Twisties at the Tokyo Games in 2021… a triple twisting double flip!”
Biles sticks her landing. She throws her arms toward the heavens. She has captured the mid-may U.S. Classic. Her performance seems incompa- rable to those who compete in and chronicle contests in the wide world of sports.
But we didn’t have a clue that, just days later, we would be witnessing another, very different performance of twisting, turning flip-floppery. This time it would occur in our increasingly narrowing world of politics. It would be a performance that a number of her competitors and chroniclers would find surprising, but certainly not incomparable in this era where spinning, flipping and flopping has become the art of the game of politics.
It was a performance that had been playing out in slow-motion throughout the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign. And it ended with a surprising swirl of political gymnastics at Washington’s normally cerebral and non-sensational Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. It was performed with the political equivalent of Olympian form by Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s former governor who became President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. Then, of course, she spent the last year or so as Trump’s last-standing Campaign 2024 critic.
Haley was one of the many famous Republicans who bluntly and consistently condemned Trump for having encouraged the mob that ended up smashing into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in the hopes of preventing Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election that Trump lost.
But most of the famous names — such as Senate Republican Leader Mitch Mcconnell, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr — then ended up caving in, shamefully saying they’ll vote to return Trump to the Oval Office.
But Haley held firm in condemning Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6. Even as she kept losing primary contests, she continued to warn voters that Trump was a major danger to our safety, security and democracy.
“Many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him,” Haley said. “They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid to say the hard truths out loud.”
Haley held to her political campaign policy of being the Olympian teller of hard truths. Until she spoke at Washington’s Hudson Institute. Having suspended her campaign long ago, she carefully never mentioned the name of her party’s soonto-be standard bearer in her speech. But in the Q&A that followed, moderator Peter
Rough asked the obvious: Who did she think would be a better president for the next four years?
It was the question that many savvy Republican pols, such as 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have easily (see also: weasily) non-answered. But Haley answered it.
She launched herself into her political version of Simone Biles’ political triple twisting double flip. Haley’s came with an added degree of difficulty — for she was coming out of months of hard truth-telling warnings about Trump being unsafe for America.
“Trump has not been perfect…” she answered. “I’ve made that clear, many many times. But Biden has been a catastrophe. So I will be voting for Trump.”
And that’s how Nikki Haley stuck her landing — splat! — in the quicksand where Trump’s MAGA herd keeps trying to graze. Trump rushed to spread the word that Haley, whom he has called all sorts of names, will be “on our team.”
Maybe Haley thinks she really can win Trump’s veepstakes. Probably she’s just hoping to be your next secretary of state.