Nikki Haley Comes Home To Trump Like Dog To Vomit

Months after dropping out of the Republican presidential primary, after which she’s served as a vehicle for protest votes against Donald Trump in the remaining primary elections, Nikki Haley said Wednesday that she will of course vote for Trump, although she still wishes he’d be nicer.

“I will be voting for Trump,” Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, said during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington.

“Having said that, I stand by what I said in my suspension speech,” Haley added. “Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him. And I genuinely hope he does that.”

But if he doesn’t — and there’s no reason to think he would, or even that he’ll tell Haley all is forgiven and he doesn’t even think she’s a birdbrain anymore — welp, party unity and all that. Haley would much rather support the guy she only managed to criticize in the last weeks of her campaign than ever vote for Joe Biden, because maybe this way she can still have some kind of voice in Republican politics.

Sorry to any of you who thought that Haley saying stuff like “Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief” meant she might grudgingly support Joe Biden or at least not endorse anyone at all.

But you see, she just can’t support Joe Biden, or even say nothing and let that be seen as the criticism of Trump that it would definitely be. During her speech at the rightwing Hudson Institute, where she now holds the “Walter P. Stern chair” and is even allowed to sit in it from time to time, Haley said that her priorities in deciding who to vote for this fall were foreign policy, immigration, and the economy.

“Trump has not been perfect on these policies. I have said that many, many times. But Biden would be a catastrophe. So I will be voting for Trump,” Haley explained, falling short of actually saying the word “endorse” so somewhere down the line, if need be, she can say “I never endorsed him.”

Despite serving as UN ambassador, Haley did not explain exactly what would make a second Biden term “catastrophic” in terms of foreign policy, especially considering that she was one of the few Republican primary candidates who openly supported aid to Ukraine. Let’s just assume that she was piling everything into “immigration,” Republicans’ preferred scare issue as ever.

Oh, here’s an interesting bit of trivia: Arrests at the border have actually declined lately, even though historically illegal border crossings tend to increase in the spring. US authorities attribute that to Mexico’s increased arrests of people trying to board northbound trains, not to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to drown migrants. Not that that’ll matter to Republicans, either.

There’s no telling whether Haley’s primary supporters will join her in being re-assimilated back into the Trump hivemind; there’s at least a plausible argument to be made that they won’t. Republicans who’ve been voting for zombie Haley in primaries have no illusion they’d make her the nominee, or even necessarily any love for her as a candidate. Their ballots might just as well have said “Hell no, not Trump” as “Haley.” As David Frum puts it at The Atlantic (gift link), “Haley’s announcement today that she intends to vote for Trump won’t raise their opinion of him; it will only lower their opinion of her.”

Zombie-Haley voters aren’t considering their future presidential ambitions or hoping against hope for a Cabinet appointment, so they’re considerably more clear-headed than Haley on the matter.

The Biden campaign says that Haley’s reabsorption by the pulsating, toxic MAGA goo-mass doesn’t alter its plans to reach out to those who voted for her, or more accurately, against Trump. Biden campaign comms director Michael Tyler said in a statement,

“Nothing has changed for the millions of Republican voters who continue to cast their ballots against Donald Trump in the primaries and care deeply about the future of our democracy, standing strong with our allies against foreign adversaries, and working across the aisle to get things done for the American people — while also rejecting the chaos, division and violence that Donald Trump embodies.”

That’s worth a shot, even if most of them will now just write in “Ronald Reagan” or stay home, which would also be just fine with us.

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[AP / The 19th / Atlantic (gift link) Photo: Mark Bonica, Creative Commons License 2.0]

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