Politico feature on Nikki Haley

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Late last year, Nikki Haley had a friend who was going through a hard time. He had lost his job and was being evicted from his house. He was getting bad advice from bad people who were filling his head with self-destructive fantasies. He seemed to be losing touch with reality. Out of concern, Haley called the man. “I want to make sure you’re okay,” she told him. “You’re my president, but you’re also my friend.”

the time of Haley’s call, Donald Trump—her “friend”—had spent much of the previous month refusing to concede defeat in an election he clearly lost, opting instead to delegitimize the institutions of government that upheld the result, indulge in outlandish conspiracy theories and generally subvert the country’s 244-year-old democratic norms. Republican leaders who possessed the credibility to dispute these claims publicly and exert a counterinfluence over the GOP electorate had chosen not to. Haley was among those who kept quiet.

For the previous four years, since being plucked from the governorship of South Carolina to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Haley had navigated the Trump era with a singular shrewdness, messaging and maneuvering in ways that kept her in solid standing both with the GOP donor class as well as with the president and his base. She maintained a direct line to Trump, keeping private her candid criticisms of him, while publicly striking an air of detached deference. Upon her resignation in 2018, the New York Times editorial page praised Haley as “that rarest of Trump appointees: one who can exit the administration with her dignity largely intact.”

Haley told me about this phone call in the second week of December. We sat in the shadow of a twinkling 15-foot Christmas fir inside the parlor of the Kiawah Island Club, an exclusive lair nestled between two golf courses and the Atlantic Ocean where she has lived since returning to private life. I had come to talk with Haley about her future; about how the antics of the outgoing president might complicate her plans to pursue that very office in 2024. Knowing that she did not believe Trump’s conspiracy theories, I asked Haley whether she had attempted to persuade the president that he was wrong—that the election wasn’t rigged, that he had lost legitimately.

“No,” she replied. “When he was talking about that, I didn’t address it.”
Since January 20, 2017, the Republican Party has become defined by its unwillingness to confront—and, in many cases, its willingness to enable—an out-of-control president. Here was Haley, someone with a reputation for speaking candidly to Trump, someone who had the courage as governor to remove the Confederate flag from her state capitol, admitting that she hadn’t bothered to challenge him—even in private—on a deception that threatened the stability of American life. Why not?
“I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told me. “This is not him making it up.”

But Trump was making it up. To date, there had been no discovery of material voting fraud. The president’s legal team had lost 55 court cases and won just one. All 50 states had certified their results and sent a single slate of electors to the Electoral College. Despite all this—despite that politically, legally and constitutionally, it was game over—Trump was inciting threats against judges and elections officials and urging Americans to take matters into their own hands.

She countered that one case remained—a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general, endorsed by more than 100 Republican members of Congress, seeking to invalidate tens of millions of votes in battleground states—and it must be heard before Trump stands down. “This is coming to the end,” she said. “Up until now, he has not been able to prove it in court. So, if this continues to go down that path, Biden will be president. He knows that.”

Never mind that the Texas lawsuit was a publicity stunt; never mind that, hours after our conversation, it was shot down by Trump’s own appointees to the Supreme Court. What was more striking was Haley’s underlying position: that because Trump believed he had been robbed, he was therefore justified in saying and doing whatever he pleased.

“You have the president of the United States telling everyone that he was cheated, that the voting systems are corrupt, that we’re living in a banana republic where the deep state has rigged this election against him,” I told her. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“He believes it,” she smiled.

Haley clearly wasn’t prepared to have this conversation. Like so many Republicans, she had expected Trump would either eke out a second term, putting a date-certain on the end of his presidency, or lose so lopsidedly that his career would be toast. Instead, he split the difference, losing by less than one percentage point in each of three decisive states, a result that sent him spiraling into delirium. The resulting paralysis could be seen across the GOP, but Haley was a special case. She knew she could not afford to antagonize the president. But her rationalizations for his behavior were so strained that they called into question her own judgment. This was a test for Haley, an early opportunity to define herself on a question of great national urgency. And she was failing.

“There’s nothing that you’re ever going to do that’s going to make him feel like he legitimately lost the election,” Haley said. “He’s got a big bully pulpit. He should be responsible with it.”

“Is he being responsible with it?” I asked.
“He believes it,” she replied.
Haley would only allow that Trump’s lawyers had “done a disservice to him.” But there was no accountability for his actions. When I pressed her—why couldn’t she answer the basic question of whether the president was acting responsibly?—Haley cut me off, pointing out the window toward an emerald-tinted putting green.

That would be like you saying that grass is blue and you genuinely believing it. Is it irresponsible that you’re colorblind and you truly believe that?” she said.
“But he swore an oath,” I said, incredulous at her analogy. “This is the president.”
“He believes he’s following that oath,” she shot back. “This would be different if he was being deceptive.”

But what about the president broadcasting a loop of lies that had been thoroughly debunked? Isn’t that being deceptive?

“He deserves the truth. Is he hearing the truth?” Haley told me. “I don’t think certain people around him are telling him the truth.”

Haley had that part right. The president was surrounded by grifters and yes-men of the worst sort. But what about Haley? She was supposed to have more self-respect than a Mark Meadows or a Rudy Giuliani or a Michael Flynn. Why didn’t she tell Trump the truth?

She never offered an explanation for this. What she did offer was reassurance, in the face of my alarm about where all of this might be headed, that everything would be fine. Her friend wasn’t going to do anything crazy.

“If this case falls through,” Haley said, referencing the Texas lawsuit, “He’s going to go on his way.”

Walking out of the White House in the fall of 2018, Haley thought the worst was behind her.

No more briefings on presidential tweets. No more knife-fighting with administration officials. No more worrying that Trump would torpedo her career. Settling back into her beloved South Carolina after a 22-month stint in New York, equipped with a big boat and a luxury home and $200,000 speaking gigs galore, Haley counted her winnings. Joining the Trump administration had been a massive gamble, and she hit the jackpot—not merely emerging unscathed from a gauntlet that maimed many of her contemporaries, but looking all the smarter and sturdier for it. She had gained rare foreign policy experience, nailed the role of adult in the room and raised her visibility in front of donors and voters alike. Her political future wasn’t just intact; it was brighter than ever before.

But there is no expiration date on a Faustian bargain. Haley knew from the moment she agreed to work for Trump, a man whose character she had lampooned mercilessly during his run for president, that she would never be rid of him. She knew that the scars of her own life story—from watching her immigrant family ridiculed, to being called a “raghead” by a fellow state lawmaker, to burying nine Black parishioners who were slaughtered by a white supremacist inside their Charleston church—were perpetually at risk of being ripped open by the president she allied herself with.

“Haley is in the same position as all these other Republicans who jumped on the Trump Train,” said Chip Felkel, a longtime South Carolina GOP strategist. “Some of this s**t, you can never get clean from it. People will remember.”

Since last fall, I’ve spent nearly six hours talking with Haley on-the-record. I’ve also spoken with nearly 70 people who know her: friends, associates, donors, staffers, former colleagues. From those conversations, two things are clear. First, Nikki Haley is going to run for president in 2024. Second, she doesn’t know which Nikki Haley will be on the ballot. Will it be the Haley who has proven so adaptive and so canny that she might accommodate herself to the dark realities of a Trump-dominated party? Will it be the Haley who is combative and confrontational and had a history of giving no quarter to xenophobes? Or will it be the Haley who refuses to choose between these characters, believing she can be everything to everyone?

A person with no pedigree, no connections, no fancy resumé, doesn’t travel from family accountant to United Nations ambassador in the span of 12 years without prodigious talents. Haley has them. She is unusually bright. She has an acute sense of timing that has allowed her to often (if not always) make her own luck. She is a natural storyteller—someone for whom the best answer is always a riveting anecdote—and has a gift for reading every room, always knowing what people want to hear. She has a warmth and common touch that camouflage her ruthless competitive streak.

But she also has liabilities. What I’ve heard again and again is that Haley’s raw skills obscure an absence of core beliefs and a lack of tactical thinking. I’ve also heard—and witnessed—how her laid-back southern persona conceals a pugnacious impulsive streak. Her unplanned outbursts and bridge-burning decisions are legend in South Carolina where she built a reputation for demanding loyalty but rarely giving it, leaving the road behind her littered with enemies as well as allies.

This is particularly relevant when it comes to Haley’s relationship with Trump. Her distaste for the man is no secret. But neither is her goal of becoming president. For the past five years, she has struck a delicate balance, and she had done so better than other members of her party. Her vicious criticisms of Trump never came back to bite her, nor did her public silence in the face of his manifest abuses.
But the era of having it both ways is over.

January 6 offered the beginnings of an answer.

“President Trump has not always chosen the right words. He was wrong with his words in Charlottesville, and I told him so at the time,” Haley told the RNC crowd, a ballroom stuffed with Trump supporters. “He was badly wrong with his words yesterday.”

Then, she added: “And it wasn’t just his words. His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.”

Make no mistake: Haley does want to be president. She told me no final decision has been made. But she has secured commitments from top party strategists, including pollster Jon Lerner and consulant Nick Ayers, men with a plan for making her America’s first woman president.

This was encouraging—and deeply vexing. Haley told RNC members what they didn’t want to hear. Yet it took an invasion of the U.S. Capitol for her to speak a truth that she knew all along—a truth many Republicans knew all along, a truth that might have saved lives and kept the country from enduring a horrible ordeal.

She took a breath. “Fast forward, I’m watching the television the morning of the 6th and I see Don Junior get up there,” she said, reciting the president’s son’s calls to action against Republican leaders, closing her eyes as if reimagining the scene. “And then I hear the president get up there and go off on Pence.

“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley hissed, leaning forward as she spoke. “Mike has been nothing but loyal to that man. He’s been nothing but a good friend of that man”

At that moment an article of impeachment was being drafted in Congress. There was even pressure for Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Haley rolled her eyes. “I think it’s a waste of time. And I think impeachment is a waste of time.”

So, I asked, how should the president be held accountable?
“I think he’s going to find himself further and further isolated,” Haley said. “I think his business is suffering at this point. I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. I think he’s lost his social media, which meant the world to him. I mean, I think he’s lost the things that really could have kept him moving.”

I reminded her that Trump has been left for dead before; that the base always rallied behind him. I also reminded her that the argument for impeachment—and conviction—is that he would be barred from holding federal office again.

“He’s not going to run for federal office again,” Haley said.
But what if he does? Or at least, what if he spends the next four years threatening to? Can the Republican Party heal with Trump in the picture?
“I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”

We need to acknowledge he let us down,” she said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Haley repeated these sentiments over the course of a two-hour conversation: “Never did I think he would spiral out like this. … I don’t feel like I know who he is anymore. … The person that I worked with is not the person that I have watched since the election.”

Was Haley really surprised that Trump, who spent the previous four years inventing claims of mass voter fraud, would try to destabilize the democratic process? If the answer is yes, as she insists, it raises a fundamental question about her discernment. If she so badly misread Trump—a man whose habits and methods she had ample opportunity to study up close—then how can she be trusted to handle the likes of Vladimir Putin?

Listening to Haley, it occurred to me that one day soon, people could be watching her fall apart. They might ask the same question: “How did this happen?”
If that day comes, the answer will rest on a simple truth: She is still trying to have it both ways.

At the heart of this contradiction is a showdown between who she wants to be and who she thinks she needs to be. Nikki Haley’s fundamental conflict is not with Donald Trump. It’s with Nikki Haley.

On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist walked into the historic Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston and sat with a group of Black worshippers who invited him to join their Bible study. He then executed nine of them, including the church’s pastor, state Senator Clementa Pinckney

Acting on the raw instincts that had always animated her, Haley called in every favor she had, enlisting allies from Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The governor orchestrated a swarming pressure campaign to force the legislature to vote to permanently remove the Confederate Flag from the state capitol grounds.

“I was in the room when she hauled legislators in, to make her final appeal on the flag, and it was one of the most extraordinary moments I’d ever witnessed in my life,” recalled Matt Moore, who was then the state GOP chairman. “People somehow think now that it was fait accompli to bring that flag down, but all the way up until that moment, I thought the vote was going to fail. The House leadership told Nikki that their members didn’t want to go through with it.

To say Haley was a long shot to join the Trump administration would be inaccurate. She had no shot whatsoever. The president-elect remembered her ad hominem insults during the primary campaign, and was heard more than once referring to Haley as “a b***h.” Unlike other Republicans who had attacked him—Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul—Haley had not apologized or come to kiss his ring. Trump had no use for her, ignoring the pleas of Pence to consider her for a prominent role.

And then, a few days after the election, Trump called McMaster. He was prepared to give him almost any position in government that he desired. “Henry, what do you want?” the president-elect asked. “Name it.”

McMaster told Trump he didn’t want to join the administration. He wanted to be governor. “That’s it?” Trump replied. “Well, that should be easy. You’re already the lieutenant governor!”

Explaining that it wasn’t that simple, McMaster decided to communicate more directly. “I need Nikki Haley out of the way,” McMaster told Trump. “I want you to find any job she will take.”

Despite being 230 miles from the White House, she made no secret of her opinion that Trump’s government was being run into the ground by incompetent egomaniacs. Haley would sneak into Washington unannounced and find an audience with the president, over the objections of people like John Kelly and Rex Tillerson, pleading a case separate from theirs.

That Haley was one of few high-ranking women in an administration that was at times cartoonishly misogynistic did not win her many friends. And given that this 40-something woman was new to the national security world—her only foreign policy experience coming from pitching tax subsidies to German automakers—Haley’s cockiness was bound to put a target on her back. But what made Haley so hated was that she played the game better than they did. No one else in the administration could get away with being so privately critical of Trump while never appearing publicly to be at odds with him.

Haley said she’s not intimidated by the potential ugliness of a presidential race

Nothing will be off-limits. Haley is hyped by donors principally because they see her working magic with suburban women, reconnecting the party with a demographic that Trump drove away. But Haley’s gender will almost certainly be used against her—perhaps in unexpected ways.

Meanwhile, Haley has fewer loyalists to protect her than ever before.

Perhaps the greatest threat to Haley is Fox News after dark. There is a reason she went on Laura Ingraham’s show on January 25—a few weeks after blaming Trump for the siege of the Capitol—and said we should “give the man a break.” (This was my latest Haley-induced whiplash; it made, by my count, three distinct stances on Trump in the span of six weeks.) She has never had personal relationships with Fox’s stars the way other Republicans do. When Tucker Carlson went after Haley last summer—responding to her empathetic remarks about George Floyd’s murder by declaring, “What Nikki Haley does best is moral blackmail”—the entire 2024 field took notice. Carlson has clearly taken a disliking to Haley. What happens if he, or Sean Hannity, or some combination of these and other right-wing voices, make it their mission to take her down?

Haley rolled her eyes when I asked about Carlson. “I’ve dealt with people like him all my life,” she said. Haley didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t need to. She’s dealt with men, white men, race-baiting white men, all her life. This campaign, she implied, wouldn’t be any different.

But it could be. There is a path of least resistance that Haley could yet pursue. No matter her passion in denouncing the president during our January 12 interview, no matter her certainty that he was crippled and the party was moving on without him, there is still time for Haley to recover. A campaign launch is two years off. She can work to rekindle that warm relationship with Trump, persuading him and his family that she got carried away. She can pretend that Marjorie Taylor Greene is just another harmless GOP backbencher. She can cozy up to the heavyweights at Fox News and convince them to pull their punches. She can pour her time and energy into denouncing those damned socialists in the Democratic Party, carrying forth as the partisan warrior queen, crossing her fingers and hoping that everyone from the redhats to the Republican National Committee members forget her momentary lapse.
Or she can say what she wants to say. She can cast her lot with Liz Cheney. She can campaign as herself. She can prove—once and for all—that her parents made the right choice by coming to the United States of America.

Hoping for a hint, I asked Haley on January 12: Does she still consider Trump a friend?
“Friend,” she answered, “is a loose term.”