It was a typical story among the many “Ladies for Nikki” group. Jamie Finch, its state cochair, who had phonebanked for Haley in South Carolina, stated Donald Trump voters would commonly name her a “cunt” and a “whore” on the cellphone. “I couldn’t consider it,” she advised me.
If these sorts of assaults had been predictable—particularly after Trump declared that anybody who donated to Haley’s marketing campaign could be “barred, completely,” from MAGA-land—they underscored the conundrum of being Nikki Haley. Within the final throes of her run, below continuous strain to cede the nomination, she had morphed right into a self-styled Joan of Arc of the GOP. As her marketing campaign sank, she fired off Taylor Swift–flavored texts and emails celebrating little ladies who had given Haley friendship bracelets, which the candidate started carrying on the path, and invoking “Iron Girl” Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister of Britain. “We’re blessed to stay in a rustic the place our ladies can develop up and do something they wish to do,” Haley stated.
If the likeness to Hillary Clinton and her 18 million cracks within the glass ceiling wasn’t clear sufficient, Haley’s marketing campaign supervisor, Betsy Ankney, advised me Haley was now “iconic,” a “historic” determine. “Nikki Haley is the only most profitable feminine Republican politician in historical past, interval,” she advised me throughout a rally in Massachusetts. “That can not be denied.”
In that sense, Haley’s political profession had come full circle. She was impressed to run for Congress in South Carolina in 2004 after listening to Clinton converse at a management convention for ladies. “The explanation I really ran for workplace is due to Hillary Clinton,” Haley stated in 2012. “I walked out of there pondering, That’s it. I’m operating for workplace.”
Naturally, each Trump and Ron DeSantis hammered Haley with Clinton comparisons throughout the primaries, a simple layup for GOP voters. Nevertheless, she persisted—although very, very fastidiously. “This isn’t about identification politics,” Haley assured Republican voters from the stump, making an attempt to immunize herself towards costs of wokeness. “I don’t consider in that, and I don’t consider in glass ceilings both.”
