by JORDAN SCHACHTEL
As someone who covers the intersections of money, power, and politics, one of the most commonly asked questions that comes my way these days involves the intrigue surrounding the Nikki Haley campaign.
Few on “Main St” seem particularly supportive of Haley — because her policy proposals routinely threaten their privacy and livelihoods — while the right flank of the GOP voting base has dismissed her entirely. Her campaign seems to be tailored to people who read The Dispatch and The Bulwark (that is, if those two entities still exist), and think fondly of the Bush era and its accompanying never-ending wars and routine liberty violations.
Simply put, the numbers don’t add up. Nikki Haley isn’t running her campaign to win over the Republican electorate. She’s running a campaign on behalf of the people in charge.
Despite the common sense that she has no path to victory , there has been a significant amount of money and power consolidating behind her campaign. Just this week, Haley held a major fundraiser for Wall Street donors who support both Republicans and Democrats, securing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. A couple weeks ago, she met with the infamous BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and other influential parasitic corporatist leaders.
In order to curry favor with her billionaire technocratic totalitarian roster of support, Haley has openly supported the dramatic bolstering of censorship and surveillance online. This also includes going on television and other forms of media, through which she expresses her support for the progressive social justice/Rainbow Jihad agenda, which notably is the status quo in Big Corporate America.
Clearly, Nikki Haley has sold her agency to a small group of powerful and influential elites, happily volunteering herself as a vessel for their political endeavors.
So, what’s the catch? What exactly is the game plan? That much still remains unclear.
But let me highlight a few possibilities:
1. Nikki Haley isn’t running for president. She’s running for VP or a high ranking, influential cabinet position like Secretary of State.
I assign this idea as having the highest probability among them all. Notably, Haley has poured tons of campaign money into attacking Governor Ron DeSantis, but has spent zero dollars on ads going after former President Donald Trump. She has also refused to criticize him even in the slightest while on the debate stage or on the campaign trail.
It’s also possible, however, that Haley wants to win over the MAGA vote. But when surveyed, these voters want nothing to do with her. So from a strategic perspective, the hands-off approach to the frontrunner doesn’t make much sense. She’s refusing to take a swing at the king, and you can’t help but to think that it’s because her backers are angling for an upgrade from the U.N. post in a potential Trump term two.
2. Haley is serious about running for president, and her donors are hopelessly misguided
While I assign this as having significantly lower probability than option 1, we can’t simply rule it out.
Neo con nikki has zero chance of winning the Republican nomination. Zero.
Nikki Haley’s job is to goad Trump into statements that can be contrived into misogyny. She has a wafer thin list of accomplishments, is not loved much in the State she was governor of, and is unlikely to carry any state. In one word, she is a tool.