What Is Nikki Haley Even Thinking at This Point?

By any objective standard, Nikki Haley appears headed toward a humiliating defeat in her home state of South Carolina’s presidential primary on February 24. Donald Trump leads her by 33.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling averages, and there’s not any sign of a groundswell mitigating, much less reversing, her fall (the latest poll, from Winthrop College, gives Trump a 36-point advantage). To put it mildly, the road ahead after South Carolina is even rockier for Haley. Available polls show her trailing badly in all the states that vote in early March. Trump’s lead among Republicans nationally is an astonishing 56.5 percent (74.4 percent to 17.9 percent) per the RCP averages. And needless to say, her backing from Republican opinion-leaders is small to vanishing in South Carolina and nationally. The whole GOP (aside from its small anti-Trump faction) has decided on a third straight nomination for the 45th president, and is increasingly impatient to make it official.

You’d think, in her current circumstances, that Haley would be trying to execute a soft landing, a dignified final stand leading quickly to the necessary reconciliation with the nominee. She has, after all, already promised to support Trump in November, even if he’s a convicted felon by then. Instead she’s sharpening and personalizing her attacks on the runaway front-runner, calling him “unhinged” and “diminished” and asserting that while a criminal conviction wouldn’t keep her from voting for him, it would make him unelectable.

Certainly Trump has provoked Haley into attacking him, as he always does; his nasty smear about the absence of her deployed husband was the sort of thing that might seriously damage a normal pol. But her response that his “disrespect for the military” made him “not qualified to be the president of the United States” is getting pretty close to the Never Trump territory she has skirted but avoided in the past.

So you have to wonder: What is her plan? Perhaps Haley has simply gotten carried away with the short-term goal of convincing independents and even Democrats to cross over in the South Carolina primary to offset Trump’s huge lead among Republicans. This could also explain her dubious decision to make a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live, not exactly the favorite TV show of the conservative Evangelicals who dominate her home state’s GOP. In any event, her appeals for outside help don’t seem to be working, and moreover, bashing Trump will simply increase Republican hostility toward her and quite possibly poison any future in Palmetto State politics.

Some observers have suggested Haley will stay in the race no matter what, in hopes that she would become Plan B for the GOP in case Trump’s status as a nominee looks shaky because of legal problems or (though it’s hard to imagine anything much worse than what he exhibits regularly) some egregiously offensive utterance. But that really makes no sense: a MAGA-dominated GOP convention would turn to almost literally anyone other than Trump’s final challenger, particularly given her recent comments about his unfitness for office.

Two possible Haley survival scenarios come to mind. One is that she’s counting on the evident joy Trump displays over the spectacle of former opponents crawling to his feet, and that he will allow her to become rehabilitated, much like 2016 rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who said far worse things about Trump than Haley has ever articulated. The other is that she foresees the Trump saga ending in such an abject disaster for her party or the country that she could yet become the engineer of a GOP reconstruction project. She won’t reach the former president’s age for another quarter-century. Even if Haley’s career in elected office in South Carolina is over, there are plenty of book deals and media gigs and appointive offices she could use to fill the time as she waits for her moment to arrive.

It’s hard to image this consummately ambitious pol with a history of displaying exceptional instincts just throwing away her political career at the age of 52, so she must have some kind of strategy. Right?