(Or, JoshuaLetter’s first foray into electoral politics.)
A September 9, 2024 ABC News piece by Oren Oppenheim articulates why I admire Nikki Haley and why I expect to be voting for Donald Trump for president in 2024:
Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley pushed back against criticism from former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Haley’s support for former President Donald Trump despite previous comments saying she found him unfit for office.
In an exclusive “This Week” interview on Sunday, co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked Cheney about Haley saying she’s on “standby” to campaign for Trump after the former South Carolina governor openly opposed him in the Republican primaries.
Cheney, who last week endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, told Karl, “I can’t understand [Haley’s] position on this in any kind of a principled way. I think that, you know, the things that she said, that she made clear when she was running in the primary, those things are true.”
During the Republican presidential primary, Haley said Trump lacked focus and that “chaos follows him.” Months later, Haley said she would vote for Trump despite her disappointment with him.
Reacting to Cheney’s remarks, Haley told “Fox and Friends” Monday morning, “I respect her decision, but she can’t say my decision is not principled. It actually is.” Haley continued:
We can either vote based on style or we can vote on substance. I’m voting based on substance. I’m looking at the fact we can’t live the next four years like we did the last four years. This is no contest.
Seeking to contrast Trump with Harris on the economy, border and energy, Haley added, “We should be very clear, if you don’t like him, say you don’t like him, but you can’t say that his policies are worse than Kamala Harris’s.”
Haley also directly criticized Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance when asked about the “gender gap” with women supporting Harris more than Trump. “I think it’s because Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women. You don’t need to call Kamala dumb. She didn’t get this far, you know, just by accident – she’s here. That’s what it is. She’s a prosecutor,” Haley said. “You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence, or looks or anything else. Just focus on the policies. When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up too.”
Last month, Trump said he’s “entitled” to the personal attacks aimed at Harris – because he doesn’t respect her and doesn’t “have a lot of respect for her intelligence.”
Haley reiterated that Trump should ditch those attacks to focus on substance. “The bottom line is, we win on policy. Stick to the policies, leave all the other stuff. That’s how he can win,” Haley said.
Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat amplifies Haley’s remarks and provides the Trump campaign with a winning theme by listing the policy failures of the Biden administration:
A historic surge in migration that happened without any kind of legislation or debate. A historic surge in inflation that was caused by the pandemic, but almost certainly goosed by Biden administration deficits. A mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan. A stalemated proxy war in Eastern Europe with a looming threat of escalation. An elite lurch into woke radicalism that had real-world as well as ivory-tower consequences, in the form of bad progressive policymaking on crime and drugs and schools.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/opinion/trump-harris-undecided-voter.html)
Further, Douthat articulates a decisive factor which is not to be overlooked:
But this unfit man was already president for four years, and for three of them his personal chaos coexisted with decent outcomes in arenas — foreign policy, inflation and immigration — where things have been much worse under the rule of the serious people, the good meritocrats, the smooth and respectable elites. And even when Covid overmastered his administration, his flailing was matched by progressivism’s period of mania, and his White House still managed to keep the middle class solvent, the stock market high, and also delivered a Covid vaccine faster than almost anyone expected.
Thomas Alderman
September 14, 2024
Joshualetter 