Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has yet to launch her bid to be the GOP's presidential nominee in 2024, but one former Republican Party campaign consultant is already writing an obituary not only for yet-to-begin campaign but for her political future.
In a brutal column tinged with regret for the New York Times, Stuart Stevens, who has worked on GOP campaigns for decades, said Haley's dalliance with Donald Trump has irreparably damaged her political prospects -- and she has only herself to blame.
As Stevens sees it, Haley had a limitless political future after her successful -- and high profile -- tenure as South Carolina's governor, including breaking ranks with some conservatives in her state over flying the Confederate flag at the statehouse.
Now that all lies in tatters after becoming Trump's ambassador to the United Nations and becoming a frequent defender of his antics and outrageous claims.
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"The politician who saw herself as a role model for women and immigrants transformed herself into everything she claimed to oppose," Stevens wrote.
Stevens then singled out Haley's recent statement in which she said, “Thank goodness for Donald Trump or we never would have gotten Kamala Harris to the border" as particularly troublesome.
"In one sentence, she managed to attack women and immigrants while praising the man she had vowed never to stop fighting," he notes.
Writing that no one "better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley," Stevens continued, "No one forced her to assert Mr. Trump had 'lost any sort of political viability' not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she 'would not run if President Trump ran,' then prepare to challenge Mr. Trump in the primary. There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that’s a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip."
"There is a great future behind Nikki Haley. She will never be the voice of truth she briefly was in 2016, and she will never be MAGA enough to satisfy the base of her party," he wrote before concluding, "But no one should feel sorry for Ms. Haley. It was her choice."
You can read his entire piece here.
