Nikki Haley once pandered to Trump. Now she must topple him

Amid the amens and hallelujahs of African-Americans looking on, it felt like we were witnessing the final surrender of the US civil war, more than 150 years after hostilities were supposed to have ended. It was the summer of 2015. A suffocatingly hot day. An honour guard wore white gloves to perform what was supposed to be a solemn ceremonial, but which had already taken on the character of a revival meeting.

Less than a month after a young white supremacist had massacred nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate flag was finally being removed from the grounds of the State House in Columbia.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

After the Charleston massacre, photographs had emerged of the gunman, Dylann Roof, wrapping himself in the Confederate colours, a fabric of race hate. To many white southerners, however, it was regarded still as a symbol of Dixie pride. Into this historical minefield strode the then-governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, who beseeched her fellow Republicans to break with the past and to banish the flag. The fact that she was the state’s first female governor, and also the daughter of Indian immigrants, made her profile of courage all the more impressive.

This week, the 51-year-old announced her long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination, arguing it was time for a new generation of conservatives to take charge, in what was an obvious, if unnamed, dig at Donald Trump.

But the autobiographical film that launched Haley’s campaign spoke of his continued domineering presence. Though the video referred to the shooting in Charleston, it said nothing of her role afterwards in hauling down the Confederate flag. Fearful no doubt of offending the MAGA faithful, a heavily white nationalist movement, she had airbrushed her personal history so that it erased her most historic personal act.

Haley reminds us of how good Republicans have turned bad. She was the Never Trumper who then served in his administration as ambassador to the United Nations. The high-minded moderate who once warned against answering “the siren call of the angriest voices”, who then succumbed to the siren call herself. The first-generation immigrant who lambasted Trump for failing to disavow support from the Ku Klux Klan but who then became a Trumpian favourite. He liked the “glamour” she brought to diplomacy at the UN.

That was then: Donald Trump, as president, with Nikki Haley when she was his ambassador to the UN in 2017.Credit:AP

One of the more striking features of the Trump age is how figures once widely regarded as respectable and impressive have tainted their personal reputations. A truthful biographical portrait of Nikki Haley also helps tell the story of how the party of Abraham Lincoln, the vanquisher of the Confederacy, became the party of Donald Trump.

Ten years ago, Haley truly did seem to represent the face of her party’s future. Barack Obama had just beaten Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, the fifth time in six presidential contests that the Democrats won the nationwide popular vote. With America set to become a majority-minority country by mid-century, the Republican Party’s post-mortem concluded it had to broaden its racial appeal. Otherwise, the Grand Old Party faced a demographic death spiral.

When, in the 2016 South Carolina Republican primary, Haley backed Trump’s then rival, the Florida senator Marco Rubio, it looked like moderate Republicans potentially had their dream ticket. It helped, too, that Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants, won the endorsement of the state’s first Black senator, the Republican Tim Scott.

For reformers who believed the party needed to look more like modern-day America, the optics of the three of them standing together on stage could not have been better. However, Trump ended up winning this pivotal primary, which gave him unstoppable momentum. When it came to arousing the conservative base, racial demagoguery outperformed racial healing.

Since then, Haley has come to typify at least three different variants of Trumpian Republican. The first is the hyper-ambitious Trump appeaser. Though a foreign policy neophyte, Haley opportunistically took the job at the UN precisely because she was a foreign policy neophyte. As she eyed a future presidential run, it filled a gap in her curriculum vitae.

Then she became a Trump mollifier, someone who, to her credit, strove to curb his worst instincts. At a time of “America First” unilateralism, when the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres feared that Trump could destroy the international body with a single tweet, she helped protect it from a catastrophic withdrawal of US funding.

Since the January 6 insurrection, she has become another familiar conservative figure: the uncourageous critic. In a speech to the Republican National Committee shortly afterwards, she said Trump “will be judged harshly by history”. Then she quickly backtracked, when it became clear January 6 was not going to bring on a moment of Trumpian repudiation but rather another wave of Republican radicalisation.

A genuine profile in conservative courage came from the then-Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who ended up losing her seat in Congress during last year’s midterm election. By contrast, Haley once again looked craven.

Maybe we should look on her campaign film more as a hostage video than a bio. For the truth is that all the Republicans with serious presidential ambitions, whether it be Haley or Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, are still captive to Donald Trump, and run scared of his personal base.

To survey her career, then, is to wonder what might have been, and to mourn the ugliness of the here and now. Sometimes, I cast my mind back to that sweltering day in South Carolina and how the lowering of the Confederate flag could have presaged a healthier brand of conservatism.

Alas, the Republican Party continues to be shaped not by Haley’s political bravery in the aftermath of June 17, 2015, the night that Dylann Roof carried out his murders, but by what happened 24 hours earlier on June 16. That was the day Trump descended his golden escalator and announced his bid for the presidency.

Dr Nick Bryant is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.

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