Longtime National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry put Donald Trump and his supporters on blast for being snowflakes about Nikki Haley’s continued presence in the Republican presidential primary in a scornful new column for Politico.
“Nikki Haley has done some terrible things. First, she tried to win the New Hampshire primary, and then she refused to drop out after finishing a respectable, if not particularly close, second,” begins Lowry before revealing that his opener is a stand-in for MAGA. “Haley is getting skewered by the MAGA right, led by Donald Trump himself, for having the temerity to persist in the act of running for president.”
Then he delved into the remarkable hypocrisy of it all:
MAGA voices are accusing her of bad form and say, as pro-Trump commentator Steve Cortes put it, that she needs to do the “honorable” thing and drop out.This is amusing coming from people who defend a man, Trump, who will fight and claw for every advantage no matter what the rules or niceties, something his supporters affirmatively like
about him.Yet they are having fainting spells that Haley may stay in the race for another month. Or to put it differently, Trump can chase Haley and Ron DeSantis around the front yard with an ax and it’s fine, but if Haley uses her salad fork during the wrong dinner course, they pronounce themselves shocked and horrified.Needless to say, if Trump had lost New Hampshire, he wouldn’t have congratulated Haley. He would have attacked her more vehemently even than after his victory, and insisted that she’d had robbed the election from him in some dastardly scheme, just the way Ted Cruz supposedly stole the Iowa caucuses in 2016.
Lowry goes on to conclude that despite the hysteria, it’s Trump’s attacks on Haley, rather than hers on him, that are doing the most damage to his general election prospects.
“She is appealing to the Republicans and Republican-leaning independents that Trump needs to substantially bring home in November to beat Biden,” he argued. “Killing her with kindness would make much more sense for Trump than, in irate speeches and unhinged social media posts, reminding her voters why they don’t like him in the first place.”
Since he victory over Haley in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, Trump and his acolytes have been on the warpath against Haley.
“Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country,” wrote