Is Nikki Haley The Next Ted Cruz?

This is our world now: a former and possibly future President’s mental disorders, moral vacuum, and absolute detachment from American interests, values, and history leads the entire Republican Party apparatus to embrace the pro-Putinist, anti-NATO GOP frontrunner’s position. We stand on the brink of reversing the most successful military and diplomatic alliance of the 20th and 21st century over a madman’s pique.

First, read the excellent if depressing piece from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan: GOP Officials, Once Critical, Stand By Trump After NATO Comments.

Trump Says He Gave NATO Allies Warning: Pay In or He’d Urge Russian Aggression is a new twist to his old hatred of NATO; whether or not the story is Trumpian bombast or not hardly matters; our allies and adversaries all get the message.

To their credit, the New York Times is paying attention to the vastly more consequential story of Trump’s pro-Russia, anti-NATO ranting than last week’s Special Counsel attack on President Biden — and make no mistake, it wasn’t just an attack, it was a job application for Robert Hur for Attorney General in a second Donald Trump Administration.

Of course, the key element of the story isn’t that Trump hates NATO and America’s traditional allies.

The key element is that not a single elected Republican has a line Trump can’t cross on foreign or domestic policy, personal character, behavior, or mental stability. It’s all baked in the cake now, and a sign that the GOP is more confident than ever that Trump will return to the Oval Office. Their obedience and terror seem to weigh in equal measure.

In all this, the one voice speaking out is Nikki Haley.

The catalyst seems to be Trump’s attacks on her husband Michael, who is presently serving overseas in the Army National Guard, but this weekend she was the one Republican burning Trump’s NATO comments to the ground.

In the last few days, she’s harkened back to the days where Republicans stood for a strong foreign policy that reflected American values and honored the mutual network of Trust and support we shared with our allies, particularly NATO.

Which is why I’m worried about Nikki.

I am rarely wrong about Republican behavior, and the one thing that will break millions of hearts after the South Carolina primary is the moment Nikki Haley embraces and endorses Donald Trump.

She knows better. She is better. Like so many Republican competitors to Trump before her, the question is…can she be better?

She either leaves this primary as Nikki Haley or as Ted Cruz.

He calls this look “Blue Steel”

Donald Trump told Ted Cruz his wife was ugly. He claimed Ted’s father was in on JFK’s assassination. (Hell, I have a closer tie to the JFK assassination than Ted does, but that’s a story for quite another time.)

For a few days on the campaign trail in 2016, Ted was a fireball, blazing away at Trump with pure, justified anger at Trump’s outrageous, personal lies. As I wrote in ETTD, if Trump had made those claims about my family he’d be eating through a straw.

But Cruz, like the rest of them who called Trump a liar, a conman, a cheat, and a fool, broke in the end. He bent down because his consultant (Jeff Roe, now famous for burning through a quarter of a billion dollars of donor money in the last two years — $150 million for DeSantis and over $100 million in 9 races in 2022) told him to calm down and that Trump would embrace him if he’d humiliate himself.

Cruz raced to do so, making himself more of a national punchline than ever. Trump has reveled in humiliating Cruz ever since.

That’s why Nikki is staring a new and challenging question in the face. Does she live what she both knows and believes and leave the race without losing her integrity? Does she continue in on the lonely road of being a Never Trump Republican and stand by her critiques of Trump and Trumpism?

Or will she make peace with Trump smearing her husband’s service, attacking her heritage, and running a new birther smear on her own place as an American citizen?

She knows by now that she’s beyond the pale for Trump to hire her as his Vice President. She knows that he’s a liar, and will destroy any and every thing she values. He never gives people who he thinks caved to him even the time of day.

Everything she’s built is at stake if she decides that Trump is a pill she can easily swallow once she’s out of time and money for the primary. It’s a dark road ahead. It’s unknown and unknowable. It means sacrificing the easy, lowest-common-denominator path for one of work and strength.

It’s hard to see her doing it. Color me skeptical, but…I’m Cassandra.

Her consultants will whisper about the fell and terrible Base, eager to extract revenge on Trump’s behalf. They’ll tell her how she’s young, and shouldn’t burn bridges.

They will tell her about the jobs she’ll lose (actually, they’ll lose, but that’s a small detail), the opportunities she’ll miss, the Senate seats she will be cut out from running in, and a catalog of other imaginary troubles.

But if she doesn’t hold the line after the primary, and doesn’t sacrifice her short-term political ambitions to the good of the nation all the tough and true talk from Nikki is just that: talk.

There are two ways for her to exit this race: as a voice against Trump who might survive into a post-Trump era, or as Ted Cruz.

And living as Ted Cruz isn’t surviving at all.