The last hope for the politically dominant globalist wing of the US Republican Party now seems to be ex-governor and diplomat Nikki Haley. They have in Ambassador Haley a candidate that will slavishly hew to the neo-liberal/cultural Marxist line.
Haley hails from South Carolina. She is the daughter of Indian parents from the Punjab. Her birth name was Nimarada Nikki Randhawa. After getting her bachelor’s degree in Accounting from Clemson University, she spent a few years working in her parents’ clothing shop. She was elected to the lower house of the South Carolina legislature, where she spent eleven years. Haley was governor of her state from 2011 to 2017. She left the governorship in the middle of her second term after being tapped as UN ambassador.
Her career in the Republican legislature was undistinguished. Oddly for a Republican, she cites as her reason for entering politics the example of Hillary Clinton as a feminist icon. Her career has been successful, but undistinguished in the sense that she never really stuck her neck out and was content to court popularity with the business community, limiting her populist appeal merely to tax cuts. When uber-globalist Mitt Romney was running for president against Obama, he seriously considered picking Nikki Hailey as his vice-presidential running mate, but chose Congressman Paul Ryan instead.
Like so many of Trump’s puzzling foreign policy appointments, his choice of Hailey for UN ambassador contradicted his mildly anti-interventionist principles. It’s probable that Trump was worried that someone who held ideas more akin to his own would end up getting stalled in the US Senate confirmation process. Ms. Hailey, at least as far as foreign policy goes, is a strict neo-con and that was her guiding philosophy in her UN post, unless it involved locking horns with her then boss, President Trump. Hailey spent a year and nine months in the job until she got caught up in a mini-scandal and ended up resigning her post a day after a watchdog group accused her of accepting free plane trips from some shady South Carolina businessmen. The kerfuffle ended up being relegated to the back pages of the newspapers. In America, if you are a politician with the “right views,” you rarely have to deal with the consequences of your actions and are never held to account. To butcher an old movie line, being a neo-conservative means never having to say you’re sorry.
Haley is a fanatical Zionist. Her support for the Israeli state is zealous and unconditional. She sees Palestinians as little more than bugs that must be crushed under foot. Whether these convictions come from a place of sincere belief or lust for Israeli lobby campaign cash, I’m not sure. I don’t see her as a person of much moral imagination, just pure ambition. She is also an unconditional supporter of the Zelensky regime and a hater of all things Russian. Out of all the contenders for the Republican nomination, she is the most fanatical on the Ukraine issue. Even Ron DeSantis, before he was forced to walk it back by the oligarchs backing him, took a shot at excessive aid to Ukraine. The other ethnic Indian in the race, Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as President Trump are for a negotiated settlement. Pence, Christie, Hutchinson and Scott are all warhawks, eager to crush the Russian bear. These men are under the delusion that it’s still 1991 and the US is the undisputed master of the world. They seem to have forgotten the poor performance of the US military in the last few wars on behalf of the military-industrial complex and the donor class.
The leftist media have been subtly plugging Nikki Haley as a possible nominee and alternative to Trump if he ends up in prison. In spite of his big money donors, they hate De Santis’ anti-LGBTQ position and his opposition to Critical Race Theory.
For both the left elite and the establishment Republicans, Nikki Haley is the perfect fit. She is a neocon in foreign policy and never met a war she didn’t like. She is a racial minority, even if her northern Indian complexion enables her to “pass” as a member of the majority race, unlike Mr. Ramaswamy. She will get the votes of the man-hating feminist crowd. A lot of Europeans are puzzled by the extremely radical feminism held by a large chunk of the American electorate, but it is a real thing here. Above all, Hailey is the kind of ambitious person that won’t let doing the right thing get in the way of her aspirations to high office. Be assured, if somehow elected to the presidency, she will dance to the tune of the oligarchs of American society — the bankers, the Fortune 500 leaders and the K-Street lobbyists in Washington.
Unless Trump is actually sentenced to prison, no one has a chance to beat him in the Republican primary. For all his faults, and there are many from the nationalist point of view, his supporters still represent the main force in the country that opposes the neo-liberal /cultural Marxist establishment. They are, in the main, humble folk with little education or sophistication, but they are the only force in the country standing up to the deep state. Their personal loyalty to Mr. Trump is deep and abiding. The Democrats thought that the dubious charges against Mr. Trump and the subsequent criminal proceedings would cause his supporters to abandon him. It worked with Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. In the 1950s as a congressman, Nixon committed the unforgivable sin of exposing the fact that scions of some of America’s finest families had signed on to the Comintern project in the 1930s and they had their revenge against him. Getting Trump indicted on weak charges that would make Felix Dzerzhinsky blush did not work; in fact, it caused red state America to rally around the Orange Man. The more phony charges they pile on, the higher his poll numbers go. Now, personally, I would prefer that these folks get to work on gaining sovereignty and independence for their individual states, but the drama has to be played out. I have, sadly, come to the conclusion that Democrat absentee ballot shenanigans in swing states will result in an outcome identical to 2020.
