10 months ago
The fiercest Republican campaign isn’t taking place between the presidential hopefuls in Iowa or New Hampshire this month, but rather in the backstage fight over who would be Donald Trump’s running mate. Or more to the point: who will not be Trump’s pick.
As Nikki Haley emerges as the former president’s most formidable opponent in the coming states, and toughens her rhetoric, her Trumpworld foes are intensifying their own efforts to block her from the consolation prize of the vice presidency.
Haley’s critics have even privately warned Trump that, were he to make Haley first in line to the presidency, he’d effectively be setting himself up for an intra-party coup, as GOP senators would use any legal or political pretext to remove him from office and elevate the more old guard-aligned Haley.
“Nikki Haley as VP would be an establishment neocon fantasy and a MAGA nightmare,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told me. “On Day One she would convert the Naval Observatory into an anti-Trump, resistance headquarters, undermining him at every step.”
The Stop Nikki effort is so forceful because Trump’s decision will go to the heart of the party’s debate over its identity.
There’s the obvious — the term-limited Trump selecting an Oval Office heir — but it’s not only succession issues that’s sparking the Haley pushback.
Her selection as vice presidential nominee also amounts to a proxy war in the equally ferocious intra-party clash over foreign policy. Republican hawks see Haley as one of their own while GOP non-interventionists such as Gaetz are appalled that Trump would consummate his nomination by picking a Republican whose national security views are anathema to America First devotees.
Look no further than the president’s eldest son, perhaps the loudest opponent of Haley’s selection, who immediately followed her on stage Monday at a Des Moines caucus site and blistered her foreign policy worldview.
“Nikki Haley wants to be in every war the world has to offer,” said Donald Trump Jr., vowing that with his father as president again America will not send the “next generation to die in yet another never-ending war.”
The preemptive war against Haley, as it were, is not lost on the former president’s closest hawkish ally.
“The same people who don’t like her don’t like me,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), calling the Haley opponents “isolationists in MAGAworld.”
Which gets at why her selection has already set off such an internal uproar — it’s about power. And namely whether Trump should cede any by offering concessions to the GOP traditionalists he’s poised to vanquish yet again.
After a term in which he was constrained by so many of the old establishment Republicans in the White House and Congress and, in the eyes of his loyalists, betrayed in his hour of need by his previous vice president it would be borderline masochistic to set himself up again.
To the old hands in Trump's orbit, elevating Haley would be an even more significant blow than the Mike Pence pick in 2016.
It recalls the last movement leader of the right who thwarted the old guard only to invite them into his inner circle. Ronald Reagan, aiming to unify the GOP, not only selected the moderate George H.W. Bush as his running mate but also made Bush’s close friend, James A. Baker III, White House chief of staff.
Which is not to say that Trump would similarly bring on Haley’s closest adviser, Jon Lerner. However, Trump’s inner circle knows Lerner, a political consultant who moonlighted as a U.N. official when Haley was there, is among the most committed hawks in her aviary. And I’m told that the GOP’s tilt away from supporting Ukraine and broader drift toward isolationism has horrified Lerner, who rarely speaks in public.
Some Republicans close to Trump find it highly unlikely he would choose Haley. Yet Graham believes the former president is open to joining forces with his most formidable rival.
How open Trump is to such an alliance, however, may be shaped by the next weeks of the race. It’s one thing for Haley to intensify her criticism of Trump between now and next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. More difficult for the relationship to survive would be an ugly, month-long battle for South Carolina.
“I think he would pick her if he thought it would help him win,” Graham told me. “But the longer it goes and the more scar tissue accumulates the less likely it is.”
Which is why, in one respect, having Ron DeSantis remaining in the race may not be all bad for Haley, at least if she aspires to be on the ticket with Trump. Were the Florida governor to siphon votes from her in New Hampshire and ensure her defeat in even a demographically promising state it would give her the cover to drop out of the race and avoid Armageddon in South Carolina.
Trump has been told, by his son Don and others, that picking Haley would ensure a significant backlash from his populist base. Yet that hasn’t stopped the former president, as he is wont to do, from quizzing people about her to test their reactions.
And some in Trump’s organization believe, like Graham, that if Trump was convinced Haley could ensure victory he’d put aside his reservations and ignore the pleas against her.
Emphasizing this point, one of Trump’s loyalists pointed out to me that the former president has mostly attacked her on policy issues and hasn’t called Haley “bird brain” for some time. (This was before Trump tried out a new, ethnic slur for her Tuesday on his Truth Social platform: “Nimrada.”)
Trump’s eventual selection represents a test of how much he believes his own bravado about defeating President Biden. How much help does the former president believe he needs to win?
One consideration Trump will make, I’m told, is a vice-presidential pick in the mold of Dick Cheney, somebody who has no ambition to run in their own right (and, unlike Cheney, may not come from the political arena at all).
That, of course, would take Haley out of the running. But it would also sideline a host of other contenders, both traditional Republicans and MAGA-aligned.
Despite Trump’s provocative claim at last week’s Fox News town hall that he already has someone in mind, few in his orbit have a feel for who’s truly in contention.
What is certain are the Trumpian attributes he’ll be looking for, namely loyalty, having what he calls “the look” and that sweet spot between having just enough talent to impress him but not so much to overshadow him.
The loyalty part will hurt the chances of some of those who opposed Trump in the primary — Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds would have been a short-lister had she not backed DeSantis, I’m told by people with knowledge.
For all his own rhetorical eruptions and sordid (and allegedly illegal) doings, Trump is also harshly judgmental about the appearance and conduct of others.
He wants fealty but not crazy. And it’s easier to detect the downside, why somebody won’t be picked, than to find the perfect candidate.
There are, though, some play-it-safe prospects. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who endorsed Trump before Iowa, would be on that list, and he’s helped because he also has another trait the former president admires: wealth. Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, would be in the same category. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) may also be in that same bloc, but it’s not clear how much either wants the job and both held out from endorsing Trump for long enough to be noticed, particularly in the case of Sanders.
He also may not do it, but there’s Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, whom Graham brought up to me as that prototype of “good enough but vanilla enough.”
Also: the Trump critics-turned-enthusiasts, namely Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). Few in the party have been less subtle about their interest in the post than Stefanik. Her viral interrogation of college presidents and decision to leave the safe space of Fox News to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” were aimed in part at proving to Trump that she can perform on a stage bigger than her North Country district.
Although, to be fair to Stefanik, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who traveled to Iowa to campaign, may have been even more unsubtle.
Noem may be considered. Yet few in Trump’s inner circle are enthusiastic about the burst of stories that would accompany her selection, namely her support for a strict state abortion ban that complicates the former president’s desire to downplay the issue and allegations that she had a romantic relationship with her principal adviser, and 2016 Trump campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.
Some high-level Republicans, though, have a way out for Trump and Noem, who has cycled through chiefs of staff and spent much of her second term as governor out of state for political events: Make her the next (well-paid) head of the NRA.
For now, though, Noem is making her case. And she’s making one against the most polarizing figure in the still-developing vice-presidential field.
When the South Dakotan dipped into Western Iowa earlier this month, she attacked Haley by name.
“Whichever way the political winds blow is where she goes, and we cannot trust our country to somebody like that either,” Noem said of Haley at a rally in Sioux City.
Benjamin Johansen contributed to this report.
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