Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley’s Useless, Boring Feud Only Helps Trump
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley have emerged as the only two viable challengers to Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican nomination in recent months.
Unsurprisingly, they’ve been at each other’s throats.
DeSantis has derided Haley as an unaccomplished squish.
“She clearly is not a conservative,” remarked the Sunshine State executive last weekend. “I think if you look at her record as South Carolina governor, people can’t even identify any major achievements that she had.”
Haley, on the other hand, has cast DeSantis as an aspiring Trump clone complete with all of the former president’s faults.
“Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy fall all over themselves to copy Trump on everything from policy to his leadership style,” argued her campaign manager in September. The campaign doubled down on the comparison in a subsequent memo, asserting that “Trump is a loser. DeSantis is a loser.”
Haley has accused DeSantis of being a “liberal” on environmental issues, knocking him for his stated opposition to fracking and offshore drilling in Florida. Subsequently, the DeSantis campaign launched an entire website alleging that Haley has been “supportive of every liberal cause under the sun.”
At Wednesday night’s debate in Alabama the pair carried on their feud in the same manner, cherry-picking from each other’s records on China, various social issues, and the implications of Haley’s corporate donors.
If either wants to pull ahead of the other, they’ll have to do better than that.
Most Republican voters are fond of both candidates, and rightly so; both been effective champions of conservative causes and would make for much better GOP standard bearers than Trump.
As a result, their efforts to paint each other as some caricaturized avatar of the worst are as superficial as they are futile.
It’s disingenuous and pedantic to ask voters to draw distinction based are up in arms over a throwaway line a candidate may have uttered years ago or their association with a
Moreover, it’s intolerably boring. Who cares what the Miami Herald wrote about DeSantis, or what Larry Fink thinks about Haley? Do you know who Larry Fink is? Is there a single Republican primary voter who trusts what the Herald reports about DeSantis?
These are not the kinds of important issues that help voters decide who is best suited to take on Trump or actually serve as commander-in-chief. They’re lame gotchas that only appeal to people who already support them, or other terminally-online political addicts.
There are some significant differences between Haley and DeSantis that merit debate. DeSantis has taken a hardline position on myriad social issues, while Haley has expressed more conciliatory, albeit right-of-center views on abortion and gender issues.
Haley is a more traditional, Reaganite hawk who sees Russian, Chinese, and Iranian aggression as an interconnected threat. DeSantis is skeptical of U.S. support for the Ukrainian war effort.
Why do the candidates think what they do? Why is the other wrong? How do their respective positions stand up to scrutiny?
These questions are elided by the juvenile, he said, she said fight that DeSantis and Haley insist on engaging in on a loop.
Who will ultimately emerge as the strongest alternative to Trump? Whoever rejects this useless, condescending feud for a more interesting one.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
