They Know it Isn't a Choice

Nikki Haley suspended her campaign following Super Tuesday, where she won Vermont and continued to demonstrate that the Trump campaign does have a 10-30% problem with Trump-averse Republicans. In her speech, in which she didn't exactly endorse Trump, she nevertheless said she hoped that Trump "earned" her voters. 

Anyone want to figure out what that means? If part of Haley's case was that Trump was the wrong man for the moment, or that his previous term in office displayed his unfitness, or that a racist, sexist, multiply-indicted adjudicated rapist was a threat to this country and a shameful person to have as her party's leader, it would be clear that he did not have the ability to earn their vote. But her case was merely a numerical one: maybe voters would prefer Haley because she was normal. She never fully addressed his freakishness.

As it was, as a member of Trump's administration she was a poor standard-bearer for that claim having already done spade-work to "normalize" him, and as a Republican who campaigned for Herschel Walker by suggesting that Sen. Warnock be deported, or who said she wanted to be Rev. John Hagee when she grew up, or who botched a simple question about the Civil War out of a sense of shameless pandering, she only magnified the degree to which, these days, to be a GOP candidate is, in some respects, to be a freak. 

It's very likely she is keeping the door open for a possible invite to a future Trump cabinet. Maybe she thinks she can be one of the "guardrails". I can't imagine why she thinks there will be any guardrails this time. A candidate who needs them in the first place has no business being a leader, and a person who would support a candidate who would need them is already showing poor judgment. 

She's not different from the majority of her party, though. John Thune, who wants to replace Mitch McConnell as Senate Republican Leader, endorsed Trump. (He's also endorsed the fairly toxic Kari Lake of AZ for her senate bid. The woman is clearly not all there, but if you're going to be a Senate Republican Leader, might as well be Majority leader while you're at it.) 

For that matter, McConnell himself endorsed Trump. Some people may have thought he was stepping down from leadership so as to avoid that, citing his awareness that Trump was behind 1/6. So? Everyone knows that! Some have also called him a "moral coward."

Pssh. Morality has nothing to do with this equation--power does and McConnell himself has been a brazen proponent of use of power when one has it; consider the way he used his power in the Senate to deny Merrick Garland a SCOTUS vote, but rushed the vote for Amy Coney Barrett. 

Republicans, as the saying goes, will fall in line. Maybe not all of them--hopefully not all of them. But two things that aren't going to happen are: the mainstream Republican Party isn't saying no to Trump and Trump himself isn't going to pivot to appease anyone in any goddamn way. 

Take whether the RNC will be used as Trump's legal piggy bank at the expense of down-ticket Republicans--yep. Of course. They know it isn't a choice.

Nikki Haley can present it that way. Who hasn't tried to discuss Trump in terms of a "time for choosing?" But the point of the authoritarian style is to close down choices until there is no choice--just an echo.