It’s 2023, So Why Is Nikki Haley Running for a Pre-2016 Republican Nomination?

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Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley announced on Wednesday she is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In her address, she said it’s time for “a new generation” of leadership to helm the Republican Party and the nation.

Unfortunately for Haley, the nomination she’s seeking is from a bygone, pre-MAGA era.

In a not-so-veiled shot at President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in her launch speech, Haley said politicians over the age of 75 should take “mandatory mental competency tests.”

Not surprisingly, she did not mention Trump by name.

Haley’s candidacy faces two immediate and glaring problems – aside from the fact that she is challenging the de facto leader of her party in the form of Trump, who has already declared. Of course, that’s a problem all Republican challengers will encounter.

What’s uniquely inconvenient for Haley is her time in the Trump administration, which means it is incumbent upon her to portray her tenure there – and by extension, Trump – as a success.

Now, she left the administration as ambassador to the United Nations on the last day of 2018. That means she can plausibly disavow or at least critique some of what Trump did in the two years after she left. She could also conceivably hit Trump on policies that weren’t in her purview while she was in the administration, but she would have to do so hard.

The problem for Haley is that this would inevitably raise the question of why she remained if she found those policies so utterly misguided. (Should they declare, this is the same issue former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will have to confront, and even more so than Haley.)

However, Haley seems to have absolutely no interest criticizing or even differentiating herself from Trump, which is the second immediate and glaring problem with her candidacy.

Just hours after her announcement, Haley appeared on Fox News, where Sean Hannity twice asked her to list some policy areas where she disagrees with Trump. She refused to answer each time, just as she had done when Hannity asked her on his show last month.

“If you had to delineate where, say, you and President Trump differ on issues, where would you start?” he asked her on Wednesday night.

She dodged the question entirely, and instead fell back on her refrain about the country needing “new leadership.”

“Look at everything that’s wrong in this country and tell me we don’t need new leadership,” she said. “But the difference is we need new generational leadership. We have to leave the status quo. We have to leave this chaos behind and we’ve gotta start talking about the future.”

Haley then spoke broadly about the issues facing the country, which are important, but in no way position her to even remotely challenge Trump in any credible way.

Meanwhile, Trump is already taking shots at Haley on his social media platform, Truth Social. The former president noted she previously said if he were to run in 2024, she would stand down.

“I told Nikki to follow her heart, not her ambition or belief,” he added. “Who knows, stranger things have happened. She’s polling at 1%, not a bad start!!!”

Trump’s missive embodies the exact tone of the forthcoming 2024 Republican primary, which will be utterly indistinguishable from the party’s 2016 primary aside from most of the cast of characters. The only question is whether other Republican candidates will target Trump early and often, which they did not do in 2016. The rest is history.

Indeed, that past may be prologue for, well, the past repeating itself.

While it’s still early, Haley clearly has no interest in taking it to Trump directly. Neither does any other rumored potential 2024 Republican candidate. As Noah Berlatsky pointed out in Public Notice, prominent Republicans have given every indication they don’t want Trump on the ticket, but nevertheless they suffer from a “collective action problem” because no one wants to be the first person unto the breach to face the wrath of the MAGA king and his subjects alone.

“We did this already,” explained The Bulwark’s Tim Miller on MSNBC Wednesday night, referring to 2016 when Haley endorsed the “optimism” of Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign. “It finished a distant third place. That’s not what the voters wanted. The voters wanted somebody that was gonna put their thumb in the eye of the people they hated. Donald Trump did that well.”

And Trump is still doing it well. Moreover, Republican voters, though polls show they’d prefer a different nominee in 2024, know what they would be getting in a President Trump because he’s already been at that rodeo, where he managed to play the role of both bull and clown. No other potential candidate can make that claim.

This isn’t to say the former president has the nomination locked up. It’s conceivable that Ron DeSantis or someone else could overthrow Trump, depending on the size of the field and how Trump’s challengers respond to his broadsides.

But as for Nikki Haley, her campaign seems built for an era to which the Republican base has no intention of returning.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.