"I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration..."

"... which is currently in formation. I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

Writes Donald Trump, politely, on Truth Social.

Here's the NYT article about the announcement. Excerpt: "Many in Mr. Trump’s orbit... viewed Mr. Pompeo as being too eager to use the military overseas.... Mr. Pompeo in 2022 also criticized Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after the F.B.I. raided his home in Mar-a-Lago.... Just days before the election, Ms. Haley said... 'This bromance and this masculinity stuff, it borders on edgy to the point that it’s going to make women uncomfortable'...."

Why not a coordinated double-coup?

What's brewing here?

"In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly talked about Rubio, Vance and Burgum, according to people familiar with his remarks...."

I'm reading "Trump search for a VP candidate narrows, with senators dominating list/At least eight people have been asked to provide documents to the campaign" (WaPo).

I'm betting on J.D. Vance, because I like Vance best as the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028. As soon as Trump wins the election — if he wins — he will be a lame duck and the 2028 campaign will have begun. Trump should want someone who can carry forward his approach to governing. Isn't that Vance?

On rejecting Nikki Haley:

"Media in disbelief as Republicans like Nikki Haley flock to Trump while Biden coalition frays."

That's the headline at the NY Post for a column by David Harsanyi.

This week, former South Carolina governor and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley finally endorsed Donald Trump. And, boy, the news was an unpleasant surprise to a political media that’s convinced themselves Trump is the next Hitler. On outlets like CNN and MSNBC, Haley was disparaged as if she were a traitor to the American republic. The American left, it seems, continues to believe a sizable contingent of Never-Trump Republican voters can sink the former president....

Why is Nikki Haley announcing support for Trump? I thought she pledged, long ago, to support the GOP nominee.

It was a condition for the debates last year. Were we supposed to just forget? Are pledges some kind of joke? Was the pledge only ever about stopping Trump from running independently if he could not secure the nomination?

Anyway, I'm seeing "Nikki Haley says she’s voting for Trump in November" (CNN). No mention of the debate pledge. [ADDED: There is a mention, buried in the middle of the article: "[D]ays before dropping out, she said she no longer believed she was bound by the Republican National Committee pledge to support the party’s eventual presidential nominee."]

There's this, from March 3rd: "Haley says she no longer feels bound by the GOP pledge requiring her to support the eventual nominee."

"If Donald Trump is at the top of the Republican ticket, the risk of one-party rule by a Democratic Party captured by the progressive left is severe."

Wrote Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch political network (Americans for Prosperity Action).

Quoted in "Months After Backing Haley, Koch Network Suspends Support for Her Campaign/The group’s chief executive wrote in an email to staff on Sunday that it would now focus on House and Senate races" (NYT).

Trump's response:

ADDED: Trump flaunted his status as a man of the people by deploying the grocer's apostrophe.

Gavin Newsom is enjoying Nikki Haley and wishes her luck.

Newsom's speech is layered with sincerity and sarcasm that feels really funny and slimy to me (and I like when Jake Tapper jumps in to say that polls suggest Nikki would "clean Biden's clock"):

Democrat Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) praises Republican Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) for working for the Democrats to undermine Trump: “She’s one of our better surrogates.” WATCH pic.twitter.com/aB2aYwWNcJ

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) February 24, 2024

Language note:

"The kind of folks that were Tea Party in 2010 are part of the MAGA movement in 2024. We owe all this to the Tea Party."

Said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University polisci professor, quoted in "How Did Haley’s South Carolina Become Trump Country? Ask the Tea Party. Veterans of the conservative, grass-roots movement see the state’s presidential primary as a fight between a 'crazy uncle' and a 'snowflake niece.' They’ve made their choice" (NYT).

Mr. Trump... made few gestures toward the libertarian economics championed by the Tea Party.... Instead, he had won attention from Tea Partiers by fanning the flames of conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and the construction of an Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

Some national Tea Party organizers had labored to keep such preoccupations on the fringes of the movement, but they remained persistent among its rank-and-file supporters and local activists.

“It was an ethnonationalist passion about a changing America,” said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University professor of government and sociology who has studied the Tea Party movement. “And that is something that Trump ended up picking up on.”...

"Vivague Ramaslimey backpedaling more than his receding hairline."

Tweeted Nalin Haley, quoted in "One Haley Who Isn’t Afraid to Let Insults Fly Nikki Haley’s 22-year-old son, Nalin, has hit the campaign trail and is taking shots at his mother’s political attackers" (NYT).

Nalin, who obscures his own hairline with massive bangs...

... even as high-foreheaded folk lurk behind him, doubles down on the receding-hairline theme:

Someone help me spot the difference I’m having trouble… pic.twitter.com/AiM6OK7ia5

— Nalin Haley (@Nalin_Haley) November 9, 2023

Ha ha. Hilarious. Are we allowed to make fun of how people look? More importantly, should candidates unleash their handsome offspring to hurl insults at their parent's opponents? If the answer is yes, then tremble at the thought of Trump releasing the Barron. But who can imagine Barron launching out onto the political landscape with blithe insults and memes? When Barron springs forth it will be with grandeur and momentousness... won't it?

"The fact that a 'none of the above' option could overpower any enthusiasm from the supporters of Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, is another blow..."

"... to her slim chances of winning the nomination over Mr. Trump, who maintains a commanding lead in polls. It also blunts any effort of hers to demonstrate momentum or score at least a symbolic victory. Mark Reynolds, 56, had planned to vote for Mr. Trump in Thursday’s caucuses. But he stopped by a polling place briefly on Tuesday morning to cast a vote for 'None of These Candidates.' 'It’s just to send a message,' Mr. Reynolds said, noting that the primary itself was a 'waste of time.'"

From "Haley Outvoted in Nevada Primary by ‘None of These Candidates,’ Without Trump on the Ballot/Ms. Haley ran essentially unopposed in the primary, which awards no delegates. The former president will compete in Thursday’s caucuses" (NYT).

1. Even writing this post feels like a waste of time.

2. Nevada has an idiotic system. I resent even having to put effort into understanding it. 

3. "Slim chances"... give me a break.

4. Why is it surprising that "none of the above" did well? I think "none of the above" is just about everybody's preference in any election. But, of course, here, "None of These Candidates" was literally on the ballot, and everyone understood that "None of These Candidates" meant Trump.

5. Elsewhere, people are trying to get "Trump" off all of the ballots. If they succeed, watch for the raging response from the "none of the above" supporters.

"Saturday Night Live" collaborates with Nikki Haley and it's embarrassing.

Even the Trump impersonator guy is off:

“I see dead people.” That’s exactly what voters will think if this race is between Trump and Biden in the fall.

Had a blast tonight on SNL! Know it was past Donald’s bedtime so looking forward to the stream of unhinged tweets in the a.m. pic.twitter.com/W43LlPOoi2

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 4, 2024

Will "I see dead people" earn a visit from the Secret Service? Or is it suitably nonthreatening to passively gaze at old people and visualize them at the end of a natural life span?

"Everyone who knew him before I did knows him as Bill, and everyone who met him after I did knows him as Michael. He looks like a Michael."

Wrote Nikki Haley, quoted in "Not Feeling Your Partner’s Name? Just Change It. When Nikki Haley decided that her future husband, Bill, looked more like a Michael, a Michael he became. How unusual are name-change proclamations in the world of love?" (NYT).

The quote is in her 2012 memoir, "Can’t Is Not an Option."

She says she didn't think the man who would become her husband looked "like a Bill," but Michael wasn't a name picked out of the blue. His name is William Michael Haley, and she decided to go with the middle name. If I'd done that with my first husband (which I might have done because his first name is the same name as my father's first name), then both my husbands would have the same name (albeit with different spellings), not that either of them looked like my idea of what a person with that name would look like.

What's the big deal about calling your loved one by his middle name (or last name or a nickname)? It's a really minor issue. And why was this story printed in the New York Times yesterday? I think they're seeing Nikki Haley about to drop out of the news and they're dumping the best of the stories they'd generated to be dispersed over a period of months if she'd continued as a candidate.

Read the old memoir and see what can be made into something... eh... don't bother.... But if she'd become the candidate, this could have been big. This arrogant monster — out of some frivolous delusion about how men named "Bill" are somehow supposed to look — deprived a man of his name. And he just took it. So emasculating! 

What's the more masculine name — Michael or Bill?

I thought it might be satire — Trump's request that the RNC not make him, right now, its "presumptive nominee."

But it's real... and Trump was for it before he was against it. CNN:

"She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint."

Said senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita, quoted in "How Trump crushed Haley’s momentum — and came closer to clinching the nomination/The former president and his allies trained their attacks on the former U.N. ambassador in the week before the N.H. primary, which Trump won easily on Tuesday" (WaPo).

Behind closed doors, Trump’s team had long viewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the bigger threat.... They quietly agreed to allow Haley to surge.... But now it was time to train Trump’s full arsenal of attacks.... In what senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita described as a “pincer” movement, Trump bombarded Haley from both ideological sides....

[Nikki Haley had been] a guarded candidate who was reluctant to fully engage with voters and the media, and whose tight, streamlined stump speech offered prescriptions for multiple problems — but without a clear sense of what her top priorities would be....

“She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint,” LaCivita said....

And here's something Governor John Sununu said Haley said to him, as she was (successfully) seeking his endorsement: 

"Man, this 'live free or die' thing is real — like you can feel it. I want to carry that to the White House."

How free are you if you're "guarded" and "reluctant" and reciting a "tight, streamlined stump speech"? You keep yourself free to be a blank canvas onto which others can project what they want.

Meanwhile, Trump isn't tight. He's very loose. I've been listening to his rally speeches. He's not guarded. He's freely expressive. But he's facing 91 felony charges, and his antagonists (some of them) picture him in prison. You can't "live free" there.

Ah, but you can, and he's already thought it through. He said this in Concord, New Hampshire last October:

"I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason. We’ve got to save our country from these fascists, these lunatics that we’re dealing with. They’re horrible people and they’re destroying our country."

"A third-place finish didn’t deliver the boost Nikki Haley wanted as she tries to turn the race into a one-on-one with Donald Trump."

That's the subheadline in the NYT for Nikki Haley and Iowa. Headline: "Haley’s Missed Opportunity: Iowa Slows Her Roll Into New Hampshire"

Haley got "the boost [she] wanted" from the media in the run up to the Iowa caucuses. It didn't work. Taking down Trump didn't work, and making Haley into his one true rival didn't work.

The central question is too "complex" for David Brooks... that is, it involves understanding the people he doesn't want to understand.

I'm reading "What Makes Nikki Haley Tougher Than the Rest." 

It ends:

Trump... has an advantage that Haley can’t match. He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unpack. But it’s a bond no amount of Nikki Haley toughness can break.

Leave it to the historians to figure out who the hell these Trumpsters were.

Why wouldn't you want to understand your fellow citizens? Your aversion to them might have something to do with their aversion to you.

Instead, Brooks writes a column about the abstraction "toughness." Politics is tough. Politicians need to be tough. Nikki Haley is tough. He muses: "I wonder if Haley would be seen as tougher if she were a man." On the toughness of women, he quotes Maya Angelou. At length!

At the end, he pivots: "This campaign is about toughness... but it’s also about identity and class." And it's here that Haley falls short. She "does better among more educated voters... and she does poorly among evangelicals, which these days is as much a nationalist identity category as a religious one."

You don't want to understand them, you want to leave them to the historians, but you are willing to cast aspersions on their religiosity and their patriotism. 

Rand Paul: "I'm ready to make a decision on someone I cannot support. I'm announcing this morning that I'm Never Nikki."

As I look over the field, I don’t think I yet have a first choice, but I do know one thing: count me in as #NeverNikki! pic.twitter.com/0RjbBhnwdc

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 12, 2024

"I don't think any informed or knowledgable libertarian or conservative should support Nikki Haley. I've seen her attitude toward our interventions overseas. I've seen her involvement in the military-industrial complex: $8 million being paid to be part of a team. But I've also seen her indicate that she thinks you should be registered to use the internet.... I think she fails to understand our Republic was founded on people like Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, Madison, John Jay, and others who posted routinely, for fear of the government... anonymously. And I think her failure to really understand that or to think that you should register through the government somehow for the internet is something that should disqualify her in the minds of all libertarian-leaning conservatives. So I'm announcing today: I'm Never Nikki."

"It appears Chris Christie was just captured on a hot mic before his town hall in New Hampshire, saying of Nikki Haley: 'She’s going to get smoked...'"

"... and you and I both know it. She’s not up to this.' Christie added of Ron DeSantis: 'DeSantis called me, petrified.'... Ron DeSantis, responding to Christie’s hot mic moment, posted on social media that 'I agree with Christie that Nikki Haley is "going to get smoked."' He doesn’t mention the other part of Christie’s comment, his claim that DeSantis had called him in a 'petrified' state...."

From "Election 2024/Chris Christie Suspends His Campaign in Republican Presidential Primary/His decision, days before the Iowa caucuses, clears a wider path for Nikki Haley in the second state to vote, New Hampshire. Donald J. Trump remains the favorite" (NYT).

"Ms. Haley isn’t getting attacked just by Mr. DeSantis in Iowa but also by Mr. Trump in New Hampshire."

"The former president’s super PAC has started running a tough ad dredging up a line she used in 2015 in which she said those who were in America illegally were not 'criminals.' 'They’re families that want a better life, and they’re desperate to get here,' Ms. Haley said in 2015, in comments that the Trump operation has highlighted in conservative news media. 'Illegals are criminals, Nikki — that’s what "illegal" means,' says the narrator in the new Trump super PAC ad.... The narrator in Ms. Haley’s most recent ad says, 'Your family deserves a border, secured.' So although the debate is in Iowa, her answers on immigration will also play in New Hampshire, where she is being blitzed with negative advertising on the topic."

From "What to Watch at the Haley-DeSantis Debate and the Trump Town Hall/Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis will debate on CNN on Wednesday night, at the same time that Donald Trump is holding a Fox News town hall" (NYT). 

Here's that heavy-handed anti-Haley ad:

Drug traffickers. Rapists. Poisoning our country. But Nikki Haley refused to call illegals "criminals. " Illegals are criminals, Nikki. That's what illegal means. pic.twitter.com/IZA9lFT9eU

— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) January 8, 2024

Poundingly, oppressively negative.

Here's Haley's ad, sunny and generic:

"What’s in the best interest of the country is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail that continues to divide our country."

"What's in the best interest of our country is to pardon him so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him."

Said Nikki Haley, quoted in "Nikki Haley says pardoning Trump is in the country's 'best interest'/Haley has often been accused of flip-flopping when it comes to Trump. Her comments about pardoning him have opened her up to further criticism" (MSNBC)