Rumors started abounding over the summer that President Trump is looking to drop Mike Pence from his 2020 ticket in favor of Nikki Haley, erstwhile ambassador to the United Nations and noted Trump bootlicker. And though Haley dismissed the rumors, it seems like she still really wants the job, at least based on all the ass-kissing excerpts floating around from her forthcoming memoir.
The Washington Post reports that in Haley’s book, With All Due Respect, she alleges that then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (both gone, because who isn’t gone?) were actively undermining Trump during their White House tenure, and asked her to do the same. And though I can’t blame anyone—even Tillerson and Kelly, who are still objectively bad—from attempting to limit the access a senile television addict with delusions of grandeur has to the nation’s nuclear codes, Haley apparently didn’t feel similarly.
Per the Washington Post:
“Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country,” Haley wrote.
“It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing,” Haley wrote of the views the two men held.
This is, to be clear, one hell of a chess move. Not that I ever want to agree with David Frum, but as he pointed out in the Atlantic this week, there was a brief time in which Haley seemed to be positioning herself as the conservative sober antidote to Trump; now, though, it looks like she’s ready hand-feed the President his 47 daily Diet Cokes in his second term. Frum seems to think it’s also a bit of a gamble—Trump has a meager approval rating of 41.4 percent, and though that certainly doesn’t mean he won’t be re-elected in 2020, if he isn’t, it’s possible Republicans will turn to party members who didn’t embrace the administration, but personally I wouldn’t bet on that.
It’s also not particularly surprising that Haley’s throwing Tillerson and Kelly under the bus. As Prachi Gupta pointed out when Haley left her post last year, she’s made no real effort to distance herself from the Trump madness outside the confines of the circus, other than a couple of mildly critical tweets. Methinks Mother should start packing now.