by Politics is a tough business, so you would think that most politicians would be tough people. In fact, in my experience, they often aren’t. Many people go into politics because they want to please everyone, and from Abraham Lincoln onward, many of them have detested personal confrontation. It occurred to me several years ago that in every administration I had covered up to that point – from Reagan to Obama – the White House staff seemed to fear the first lady more than they feared the commander in chief.
Obviously this has changed in recent times. Donald Trump was tough, mean, and self-pitying (a clever combination). President Biden is tougher than he seems. And the woman who is now Trump’s main rival, Nikki Haley, is one of the toughest politicians in the United States, by which I mean confrontational, willing to crush her enemies.
When you read accounts of his days in South Carolina, his bellicosity shines through on the pages. In a fantastic profile of 2021 in Politico Magazine, Tim Alberta quotes a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party: “Listen, man. She will tear you to pieces. Nikki Haley has a memory. She has a memory. She will remember who was with her and who was against her. And she will not give a second chance to anyone she believes wronged her.”
But the most telling quote is the one Haley gave to Alberta herself: “I don’t trust because I’ve never been given a reason to trust.”
He grew up in the only Native American family in a small working-class town in South Carolina. The stories she tells about her childhood often deal with exclusion: being disqualified from a beauty pageant because it was created to allow only one black and one white winner (although some locals dispute this); a fruit seller who called the police because her father was a dark-skinned man who wore a turban. She once described her childhood as “survival mode.”
Today, many people think of Haley as part of the old Republican establishment, a political descendant of the Bushes and Mitt Romney who suddenly finds herself trying to thrive in a party dominated by Trumpian populists. This is not quite right. Haley entered politics as a Tea Party maverick. Like Hanna Rosin noted in The Atlantic In 2011, the Tea Party was led by women and most of its supporters were right-wing women who, among other things, wanted to take on the old Republican network. Women like Haley and Sarah Palin came forward as whistleblowers, fighting corruption.
Haley ran her first campaign, for the state legislature, against a Republican incumbent of 30 years. That ensued It was classic South Carolina politics. An email came out attacking her and referring to her by her birth name, Nimrata Randhawa. A rumor campaign suggested she was Buddhist or Hindu. (In fact, she is a Christian and attends a Methodist church.) When she came to the legislature, she didn’t fit in with the old guard. “I’m telling you, no one liked him. Nobody wanted to work with her. They hated her,” another state representative, who became a close friend of hers, told Alberta.
Alberta captured this period of her career this way: “Many of her fellow Republicans came to hate her for not being a team player, for acting dishonestly on certain votes and procedures that made them look slimy or stupid for her benefit.”
In 2010 he had little chance of winning. the race for governor until Palin visited the state to enthusiastically endorse her. Once again the harsh rules of South Carolina politics prevailed. Two men emerged at the height of the campaign, including a lobbyist who had worked for one of her rivals, claiming to have had affairs with her, although he lacked evidence. A fellow legislator called her a “raghead.”
After her political career imploded, Governor Mark Sanford gave Haley a $400,000 donation at a crucial moment in the campaign. “And then she interrupted me,” Sanford recalled to Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki: she excludes people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost as if there’s some weird psychological thing that forces her to pretend she did it herself.”
When she was governor it was more of the same. She frequently went to war with legislators to get her agenda passed. “I have called the Year 1 legislators,” she once declared. “I go to their districts and call them. I mean, it’s what I’m known for. I put your votes on Facebook.” One of her great successes as governor was relentlessly pressuring corporations to build their plants in South Carolina. When she left office, the state had 400,000 more jobs than when she took office.
She brought the same aggressive attitude to her work as a UN ambassador. All U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations defend Israel, but Haley made it the centerpiece of her work. She walked into a famous anti-Israel institution with her fists raised. She was one of the people who made the Trump administration so supportive of the Jewish state. When close allies such as Britain and France voted in favor of a resolution condemning the United States’ decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she did not invite their representatives to a reception for the American mission, which is practically a war in UN terms.
Viewed through a single lens, he is a ruthlessly ambitious person who is happy to hurt people to succeed. Viewed from another perspective, she is a brave renegade fighting the old guard to get things done. Viewed through a third lens, she is an unnecessarily competitive personality who makes enemies galore. All three points of view seem to contain some truth.
A few things need to be said to complicate this picture. First of all, although he knows how to play hard, his heart has not been hardened. When nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston were shot and killed by a white supremacist in 2015, she was vulnerable and afflicted in public and private. She went to all the funerals. Her friends were concerned that she was losing a dangerous amount of weight. Mobilized by sadness and anger, she helped persuade more than two-thirds of both houses of the legislature to remove the Confederate flag from the state Capitol grounds, which was an astonishing act of political skill and moral fortitude that even her detractors admire.
Second, if she is often tough as nails, she has generally been tough as a tulip on Trump. As the Times’ Sharon LaFraniere reported, she was not one of the Trump officials who would stand up to try to stop him from carrying out his wildest ideas. “Every time he criticizes me, he leaves me without criticizing about 15 minutes later.” Trump told Vanity Fair in 2021, which is pretty accurate.
I wonder if Haley would be seen as tougher if she were a man. I also wonder if her toughness was forged by being a woman in a conservative, male-dominated state. Maya Angelou offered some wisdom about female toughness in her 1993 book, “I Wouldn’t Take Anything for My Trip Now.” She wrote: “The woman who survives intact and happy must be both tender and tough. She must have convinced herself, or be in the endless process of convincing herself, that she, her values, and her choices matter. In a time and world where men exercise dominance and control, the pressure on women to give up their rights of passage is tremendous. And it is precisely in those circumstances that a woman’s toughness must be evident.”
By this measure, Haley has been surprisingly successful. But then Angelou added a detail: a woman “will need to value her tenderness and be able to show it at appropriate moments to prevent harshness from acquiring total authority and to avoid becoming a reflection of those men who value power over life.” . and control over love.”
There has often been caution around Haley, with people worrying that it is mostly about herself. Trump, who really is all about himself, has somehow become the much-loved tribune of the working class in a way that his opponents simply have not.
The Republican Party has come a long way in recent decades. The party is no longer in the mood for compassionate conservatism or even the cheerful optimism of Ronald Reagan. Republicans feel under siege and want a bully guy to defend them. In their own ways, Trump and Haley are products and architects of the current Republican environment. Neither Trump nor Haley sit down and read Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Neither Trump nor Haley have what you would call fully developed philosophies. Neither is conventionally partisan; Both made efforts attacking the Republican establishment, without managing to rise within it.
Mike Pence was too boring to live up to the party’s current mood. Tim Scott was too kind. Trump and the woman who is now his main rival are different versions of a bare-knuckle ethos, and if you look at their backgrounds, it’s pretty clear that Haley is actually tougher than Trump. She is confrontational about policy, while he is confrontational about ratings. She is a doer; her attention span is not enough to make him an effective executive. If Republicans want someone to execute her agenda, they should support her.
Unfortunately, Haley’s support in the Republican Party appears to have a low ceiling. This campaign is about toughness and finding someone who can defend a party that feels under siege, but it is also about identity and class. Haley is rising, but she is rising primarily among college-educated voters. Overall, Haley does better among more educated voters than less educated voters, slightly better among men than women, and does poorly among evangelicals, which these days is both a nationalist and a religious identity category. .
Trump also has an advantage that Haley can’t match. He is vilified by the coastal professional classes. It is a sacred bond with rural and working-class voters who feel equally unappreciated and invisible. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unravel. But it’s a bond that no amount of Nikki Haley’s harshness can break.
