The 2024 Republican presidential sweepstakes is a peculiar competition in which the contestants battle among themselves to see who ultimately can finish second in at least the early primaries without taking themselves out the running to be picked as Trump’s running mate. It’s difficult to differentiate oneself when having to act like an independent-minded and unique candidate and be a boot-licker to the frontrunner at the same time.
The GOP nominating contest is a circus that requires a lot of double talk, outright lying, and despicable policies that aim to hurt some people rather than trying to help all people. With one or two exceptions, the GOP nomination charade requires trying to out-Trump Trump with outlandish statements and embarrassing episodes of candidates having to show fealty to a criminally indicted ex-president.
Not a single challenger or would-be challenger to Trump has caught fire enough to pose a real threat to Trump. The stunts by DeSantis, like flying immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, crashed on landing. Ramaswamy’s bid to portray himself as ‘fresh face Trump’ didn’t bring smiles to the MAGA base. And Chris Christie's message of 'I’m normal and that’s okay’ has turned out to be a sentimental journey back to when Republicans elected the Bush family to high office – and that shrinking wing of the GOP is just too far in the rearview mirror to try to appeal to.
So the Republicans are left with Haley as the new flavor of the month hoping to topple Trump with an agenda of delaying Social Security and Medicare for Americans approaching retirement age and eliminating it for millions of others who are already paying into the system. Specifically, Haley is pushing a work until you die scheme that raises the age eligibility for Social Security and eliminates it for future generations.
Like everyone in the GOP leadership, Haley wants to give billionaires and corporations a second Trump tax cut that would be paid for by gutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
None of this should be a surprise. Gutting the American Safety Net has long been a cause for Haley, like most Republican leaders currently holding or seeking office. Haley was able to go after parts of the Affordable Care Act as a governor, but she couldn’t get her dirty hands on Social Security or Medicare unless she held high federal office.
Haley also has a costly scheme she tries to sell as a middle class tax cut in which she claims she would eliminate gas taxes. The obvious problem is that revenue from gas taxes go to building and maintaining highways and public transportation, so Haley’s bad idea would leave truckers, commuters and travelers in a giant pothole of a mess that would require a tax hike to fix in the long run. Haley, a beneficiary of Big Oil money and largesse, won’t address the real problem for Americans, which is the industry profiteering and market manipulation that triggers the fluctuating and inflation-causing cost of oil and gas that always seems to hit Americans when we need to travel most.
Haley’s ascent to No. 2 is, at least in part, thanks to the endorsement in November by Americans for Prosperity, the political arm of billionaire Charles Koch (pronounced coke), an anti-government Big Oil oligarch with holdings in paper, mining and chemical industries, among others. The coveted but controversial Koch endorsement was joined days later by billionaire Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase. In both cases the endorsements were more against Trump than for Haley, but down 40 points behind Trump in the polls, Haley will take what she can get.
In Trump, the Koch heads now seek to destroy a monster they helped create. Americans for Prosperity was the biggest astroturfer of the Tea Party midterm elections of 2010, pumping $30 million into GOP campaigns, according to The Washington Post. The big money backers gave the Tea Party slate it funded well known marching orders to vote to overturn Obamacare immediately, before the American public discovered the massive advantages it provides in health care insurance and protections.
At the behest of the Koch cabal, the Tea Partiers quickly after taking office, began to force scores of failed votes to overturn ACA in Congress, and even shut down the government in 2013 for a couple of weeks in an extreme attempt to gut the ACA, costing the government $24 billion, according to Wall Street ratings referee, Standard & Poors. All told, there were more than 70 failed attempts in Congress to vote to overturn the ACA, none more dramatic or consequential than the Senate vote on July 27, 2013. By then, Trump had grabbed the lead role in the Koch’s cause to repeal Obamacare, which would have ended health care coverage for millions of Americans. If not for the one Republican iconoclast with the guts, integrity and clout to take on Trump, the powerful Koch-Trump alliance would have succeeded in voting to repeal ACA.
Long before the late great Sen. John McCain smoked Trump and the Tea Party supplicants on ACA, Haley was doing her part to serve the Koch heads. As governor of South Carolina, she denied millions of residents in the state health care coverage available under Obamacare. Although she didn’t have a vote in Congress, she was a loud anti-ACA cheerleader during the repeal effort.
“We have fought Obamacare in South Carolina as much as we possibly could. We said no to the state exchanges. We said no to the Medicaid expansion,” Haley boasted to right wing news outlets in 2013 while governor of South Carolina.
The billionaire boys club apparently waited to endorse Haley until one of their own members of the corporate cabal, Virginia Glenn Youngkin, flamed out. Youngkin banked on a total Republican takeover of the Virginia legislature in last month’s state legislative elections. Had Youngkin succeeded it would have meant for Virginia an extremist bait and switch abortion ban, new anti-worker policies, an end to early voting, and a new era of Jim Crow voter suppression laws.
Youngkin was expected to announce his challenge to Trump within days if Virginia Republicans took complete control of the state House and Senate, a top Youngkin donor told reporters.
Haley and Youngkin share at least two significant traits: they are slick operators, and there is plenty of evidence they will say anything if it helps them reach their goal of replacing Trump as the GOP presidential nominee.
Youngkin demonstrated his double-talk with a dubious watered-down bill taking reproductive rights away from women. Youngkin knew Virginia GOP lawmakers would put forward a vindictive abortion ban that resembles that of Idaho, which is facing a healthcare crisis beyond women’s reproductive rights because of its own extreme abortion ban. “‘It depends on what makes it to the floor of the Senate and the House — if it will pass. That is why we are fighting to get as much as we can,’ said state Del. Tara Durant, a rabid anti-abortion Republican from Virginia, according to the Richmond Times-Democrat.
Haley is running on a ‘wants it both ways’ agenda aimed at wiping out reproductive rights. She had tried to soften her extreme anti-choice agenda by letting it be known that she urged Republicans in Congress not to seek a national ban on abortion while babbling about finding a “consensus” on abortion, but it turned out to be a ‘she will say-anything’ stunt. With anti-abortion religious zealots co-mingling with the MAGA base recently had to clarify ahead of the primaries that she intended to sign a six-week abortion ban as governor.
Some Republicans question her authenticity and her word. GOP lawmakers in her own state accused Haley of chameleon-like shape-shifting with her overnight conversion from Sikh to Christian. Many South Carolina Republican lawmakers didn’t believe the conversion and let Haley know it by teasing her to try to get her to react.
“Everybody knew she wasn’t a real Christian. Everyone knew she converted for political purposes,” Jake Knotts, a veteran GOP lawmaker now retired, said in a 2021 Politico Magazine piece. “Her whole career has been stair-climbing, and becoming a Methodist was just one of those stairs.”
In fairness, the religion question says more about her GOP colleagues’ intolerance, but that won’t keep MAGA operatives from chomping at the bit to make it an issue if Haley moves from longshot to legitimate contender. For Democrats, conscientious Independents and old school traditional Republicans, Haley’s faith won’t be, or at least shouldn’t be, an issue.
The real problem is trusting the word of candidates like Haley. MAGA doesn’t trust Haley to carry the Trump legacy and centrist voters don’t trust her to keep House Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson and rightwing Supreme Court stacker Mitch McConnell from finishing their sinister scheme for taking rights away from women, minorities, young people, and the most vulnerable Americans.
Written by Ken Bazinet, former White House correspondent, covered three presidents and five presidential elections. Still writing, he works with organizations and individuals that focus on opening and expanding ballot access to Black, Latino, Native American, pro-worker and rural voters.