Warming up the crowd in Charleston, S.C., before Nikki Haley formally announced her presidential run, Rep. Ralph Norman did something she didn’t: praise Donald Trump.
Which isn’t to say that Trump was wholly absent from Haley’s remarks. She mentioned him as the guy who made her U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She also came out for “mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.” Trump is 76.
The kickoff rally provided some hints about how Haley would position herself with respect to Trump. That question has been the subject of some speculation because she has gone back and forth on her former boss — enough so that Trump reportedly quipped in 2021 that “every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later.”
Her campaign will also answer another question: What does she think accounts for Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party?
Seven years after it took place, Republicans have no consensus answer. Norman hinted at one: It was Trump’s personality — and especially his combativeness — that won the allegiance of Republican voters.
Haley might try to make the case that she will hit hard, too, or at least hit Democrats hard. At the same time, she will differentiate herself from Trump demographically, with her age in the foreground and race and sex in the background.
Other Republican politicians, notably Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and J.D. Vance (Ohio), have taken a different approach. They might believe that Republicans found Trump’s manner appealing, but they have also adopted some of his policies and themes. They criticize the Washington consensus of the last several decades on trade and foreign policy.
Hawley and Vance don’t say that liberating markets from big government is enough for America to thrive. Instead, they talk about elites who don’t have most Americans’ interests at heart — and their rhetorical targets are as much corporate leaders as self-described progressives. They talk less about American or conservative principles than pre-Trump Republicans do, or than Haley does.
Haley has said she does not wish to return to the pre-Trump Republican Party, but in all these respects — trade, muscular internationalism, limited government, free markets — that’s the party she is speaking for.
She might even want a purer distillation of the pre-Trump party. In 2020, Haley criticized other Republicans for advocating “a watered-down or hyphenated capitalism” when we should instead “double down on capitalism.” Calling for tax credits or regulations, she wrote, would put us on “the slow path to socialism.” She couched this argument as praise for Trump, ignoring all the ways he broke with libertarian economics — as, indeed, every Republican president has done.
In theory, a Republican could acknowledge that Trump’s success exposed the inadequacy of the party’s 2015 program without adopting his entire program. A candidate could say no to Trump’s scattershot trade wars while also working harder than pre-Trump Republicans did to expand opportunities for Americans without college degrees. She could talk about failures of governance and accountability without inventing conspiracies. She could look for ways to use markets as a way to solve problems rather than merely cheering for them or denigrating them. Maybe she could even find a middle way between the typical politician’s habit of trashing people without naming them and Trump’s habit of attacking their families and accusing them of crimes.
But there is another possible synthesis that is less promising, and it’s what Haley is so far offering: an old-style Republicanism that learned nothing from Trump except to be more insulting.
In his introduction, Norman noted that he had been elected to the state legislature with Haley in 2004. He had gained some wrinkles since then, he said, adding, “You know who has not changed? Nikki Haley.”
That could be what sinks her candidacy.