Arguably one of the more hilariously sad events in the 2024 GOP presidential nomination contest dominated by former President Donald Trump is Nikki Haley doing a victory lap after winning Washington, D.C.
Sunday’s conquest was the first win for the former South Carolina governor and delusional hanger-on — and the victory couldn’t have come in a more fitting place.
Should it come as a surprise that one of the most notorious swamp creatures among modern-day RINOs won the swamp? Even Democratic Party public relations firm Politico knows this is no grassroots conservative victory for the Trump-bashing former United Nations ambassador.
“Nikki Haley won her first presidential primary on Sunday. She just had to wait for the D.C. insider crowd to vote,” Politico’s Natalie Allison wrote.
Lest Haley get too big a head, the piece came with the leveling sub headline, “Her win comes ahead of an expected blowout by Donald Trump on Super Tuesday.”
In fact, the swamp was all Haley could scrabble out of another disastrous weekend in her prolonged quest to … what? Capture the GOP presidential nomination? Jostle for a Trump cabinet post? Showcase her availability for a top-ticket run for the Trump-hating No Labels political brand?
She was badly beaten — again — in Missouri and Idaho, and Trump trounced his remaining rival at Michigan’s convention caucuses over the weekend.
But Haley took more than 60 percent of the vote in Democrat-dominated D.C., where Republicans could rightly be listed on the endangered species list. That fact didn’t stop the establishment candidate from bragging about her big victory, and attempting to fundraise off of it.
“The results are in and Nikki Haley DEFEATED Donald Trump in the DC primary!” Haley’s campaign proclaimed in an email blast early Monday morning. “With just 2 DAYS until Super Tuesday, we cannot let the momentum slip.”
What momentum? Haley’s “rise” is more akin to “JoeMentum” — as in former Democrat U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s self-labeled (and delusional) descriptor of the bump he thought he was getting going into the 2004 New Hampshire presidential primary. Like Haley, lonesome Joe was wrong. Not even his old presidential running mate Al Gore would back his troubled run. Lieberman quickly dropped out.
But not Nikki. Nikki’s in it to win it, or so she insists.
“Ahead of Super Tuesday TOMORROW, we have to keep the momentum surging, leave no stone left unturned, and keep pouring in everything we have to win this fight and save our country!” Haley urged in a reality-challenged fundraising appeal.
Somewhere, Don Quixote is saying, “This chick’s bat crap crazy!” Unlike Cervantes’ Man of La Mancha, there’s nothing particularly noble about Haley or her quest.
Despite her assertions that she is the Pepsi of the Grand Old Party, the standard-bearer choice of the new generation, she is as Washington insider as they come. A brief perusal of her record and her backers makes that fact abundantly clear.
For all of Haley’s self-righteous attacks on Trump’s moral turpitude, the long-time political climber has stumbled with the truth where it really hurts in politics. The GOP presidential candidate is now hinting that she might not endorse the eventual Republican nominee if that nominee is Trump, an about-face from her previous pledge — a pledge demanded by the Republican National Committee.
She’s not obligated, she told NBC’s Meet the Press, because she has “serious concerns about Donald Trump.”
Haley likes to say she’s been underestimated time and again in politics. Perhaps. Not this time, though.
She has been obliterated in all but one nominating contest thus far, and the expectation, founded in Trump’s unprecedented lead in the polls, is that she will have her establishment backside handed to her again on this Super Tuesday. Her quixotic quest for the White House will then become even sadder.
But sad is the appropriate label for any self-described “true conservative” who claims victory in winning the swamp.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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