The Great Republican Normie Hope Kind of Sucks
Nikki Haley tells us who she is.
Alert: C-SPAN has handed off their 9am hour on Saturday to me, Tim, and Sarah. It’s a Next Level takeover. We will be taking calls. I will have to interact with Average Viewers. I’ve been told that I’m allowed to do certain characters on the show, like Skinny Joey, from Jersey. But not Cletus. Or Foghorn Leghorn.
C-SPAN has made a huge mistake, so be sure to tune in.
Saturday, 9am in the East, on C-SPAN.
1. Nikki, Nicky, Nikay
Remember the Republican debate? Nikki Haley established herself as the Great Normie Hope with a strong performance in which she (a) defended aid to Ukraine; (b) blamed both Democrats and Republicans for excessive spending; and (c) said that Donald Trump was the most unpopular politician in America.
She excited various Never Trump types (including me) and earned a second look from voters.
Let’s check in to see how that second look is going!
Ruh-ro. You may remember Don “The General” Bolduc from such hits as Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, his 8-point loss in the 2020 New Hampshire Senate Republican primary, or his 9-point loss in the 2022 New Hampshire Senate general election.
Not a great sign!
What else has Nikki been up to? Well, last weekend she hit the Sunday shows to give all the second-lookers a good ol’ gander at what she’s selling.
Let me translate that for you: Haley says that yes, she will support Trump even if he is a convicted criminal. But only because she signed a pledge to do so. And not to worry, because nobody else in America will vote for him, so her support for the criminal won’t do any damage.
Leadership for a New Generation: Vote Nikki!
So we’ve seen how Haley handled her second look at the organizational level and with the media. How about with actual voters?
Oh boy.
You should watch the video. What happens is that a voter asks her about her debate moment when she raised her hand saying that she’d support Trump even if he was convicted of crimes. This voter was very concerned by that.
Why?
Because this gentleman was worried that she was lying at the debate and wouldn’t actually support a convicted, jailed Trump.
Voter: You said some pretty harsh things about President Trump on that debate stage. And so, people are wondering if you were lying when you raised your hand to say you would support him, even if he were in jail.
Haley: I raised my hand on that stage—
Voter: Could you raise your hand with us to say that you would support President Trump even if he was in jail?
Haley: I raised my hand on that stage. I raised my hand because the Republican nominee is better than a President Kamala Harris. And I will say that every day of the week.
So much for being the grownup in the room.
Thus concludes Nikki Haley’s second look. The hunt for the Good Republican continues.1
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2. Goalposts
Sarah and I just finished taping The Secret Podcast. The show will be out in a few hours but I want to address a great point Sarah made about the weirdness of obsessing over whether or not Republicans will support a Trump who is convicted of crimes.
Because think about how far these goalposts have already moved.
We’ve spent the last seven years asking Republicans, Would you support a candidate who:
Was caught on tape bragging about sexual assaults?
Has been impeached?
Refuses to promise a peaceful transfer of power?
Failed to concede his election loss?
Attempted to overturn a lawful election?
Incited a violent insurrection?
Was impeached a second time?
Has been indicted on 91 criminal charges?
With Trump, we’ve been posing hypothetical “would you support a guy who has done Bad Thing X” since 2016 and the answer from both elite and rank-and-file Republicans has been “Hells, yeah!” Every. Single. Time.
Why would “Has been convicted of crimes” suddenly produce a different response?
Let me tell you what will happen if Trump is convicted: The goalposts will move to “Is in jail.”
Because if Trump is convicted, he won’t go directly to jail. He’ll be released on bail pending appeal and Republicans will say:
The legal process is still at work!
There were a number of irregularities in the trial!
His case is under appeal and he’ll be vindicated!
The jury was rigged!
He’s not even in jail yet, so he hasn’t really been convicted!
And if, by some miracle, Trump does wind up in jail, they’ll move the goalposts again. For people like Nikki Haley, there is no hypothetical scenario in which Trump can do something so awful that they refuse to bend the knee to him.
Because these Quislings understand very clearly what their people demand of them. And they would die before they took sides against their tribe.
3. Tennis
I’ve been gently hinting about my suspicion that tennis has a PED problem for some time now: 30 years ago it was not uncommon to have teenaged champions and players rarely won majors after age 27. Today, Top 20 teenagers are rare and both men and women win majors well into their 30s.
Novak Djokovic has been more dominant as a 35-year-old than he was as a 25-year-old and he’s not the only one.
I’m sorry, but “nutrition and physio” only get you so far.
The other reason I suspect tennis of sweeping PEDs under the rug is that the sport has had a massive match-fixing problem for ages. And it has done everything possible to keep this problem a secret.
On the morning of his arrest, Grigor Sargsyan was still fixing matches. Four cellphones buzzed on his nightstand with calls and messages from around the world.
Sargsyan was sprawled on a bed in his parents’ apartment, making deals between snatches of sleep. It was 3 a.m. in Brussels, which meant it was 8 a.m. in Thailand. The W25 Hua Hin tournament was about to start.
Sargsyan was negotiating with professional tennis players preparing for their matches, athletes he had assiduously recruited over years. He needed them to throw a game or a set — or even just a point — so he and a global network of associates could place bets on the outcomes.
That’s how Sargsyan had become rich. As gambling on tennis exploded into a $50 billion industry, he had infiltrated the sport, paying pros more to lose matches, or parts of matches, than they could make by winning tournaments.
Sargsyan had crisscrossed the globe building his roster, which had grown to include more than 180 professional players across five continents. It was one of the biggest match-fixing rings in modern sports, large enough to earn Sargsyan a nickname whispered throughout the tennis world: the Maestro.
Read the whole thing. A sport that doesn’t make an example of athletes monkeying with the integrity of the game for betting purposes is going to do everything possible to turn a blind eye to PEDs.
Nota bene: I’d still take Nikki Haley over Trump or DeSantis. Without a doubt. If Nikki were the Republican nominee, I’d sleep well at night and be hopeful for the future of America. It would be great.
But we can dispense with the idea that she’s actually the great, normie savior.
I'm going to posit something here: maybe the reason the normie republican candidates are so bad is because the normie republican positions are bad?
Hear me out. What exactly IS the normie not-MAGA position on the various issues? The one you point out is Ukraine, but in that case, the position is identical to the Democratic Party's position on Ukraine. So that's not a uniquely normie Republican position. If anything, given their size relative to the party, that's a Democratic party position they've adopted.
Furthermore, let's ask another question: what policies of the previous GOP ethos should we be currently adopting? Whenever I hear defenses of Reagan, it usually boils down to defenses of his outlook; morning in America, shining city on a hill, all that stuff. Most of it does not boil down to his actual policies, which stem from bad in hindsight (Iran-Contra) to bad at the time (gutting things like the EPA).
In fact, moving forward, I have argued before and I will argue again that if you were behind the GOP's position on nearly ANY issue over the last twenty years, you've been wrong. That's not to say that there isn't a room for conservative ideas, but the position the GOP has taken has been objectively incorrect on nearly every measure.
The War on Terror was not quick or easy to win. Privatizing healthcare and opposing the affordable healthcare act was not a good idea. There were no 'death panels.' The immigration 'crisis' did not materialize. The debt increased far more under GOP presidents than Democratic ones. Gay marriage being legal did not lead to people marrying animals. Climate change is not a hoax. Removing the gun control legislation for things like assault weapons did in fact lead to an increase in mass shootings. Deregulating the financial industry did in fact lead to recessions and crisis in various financial industries such as mortgages. Gutting the various restrictions on money in politics did in fact lead to corrosive effects in politics.
None of this means that the far left position of say, Bernie Sanders is correct. But nor does his existence mean that any of these things I've said are less true. If you supported the GOP position on these issues over the last twenty years, you've been objectively wrong on what would happen. This has played out in real time too; GOP led states are poorer, have higher crime rates, and less opportunity than Democratic led states. If you had the misfortune of living somewhere like Kansas during their last Governor, then you got to experience what happens when they literally try to dismantle everything and watch it collapse.
All of this is to say that if you're a 'normie' non-Maga GOP member, you either need to believe that you were wrong on everything and yet still don't want to change course, or you believe that if you just wait long enough, eventually you'll be right, like waiting to put out a house fire because you think eventually it'll rain.
Because ultimately, if you're a pro-Democracy pro-free trade individual, that makes your candidate Joe Biden. Every other 'normie' republican has either joined MAGA or decided to step aside.
Which to me means that the reason all these normie candidates like Haley fail is because all the normie GOP positions are either out dated or terrible. At best, they're just repeating talking points from fifteen years ago. At worst, they've got nothing to say. And Haley has nothing to say, nothing to contribute. She could be replaced by a cardboard cutout with a speaker and nothing would be lost.
And lest we forget, this is a woman who served as Trump's UN ambassador and defended things like his Muslim ban in front of the world. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if there is going to be a conservative alternative to MAGA it isn't going to come from the people who failed to defeat it the first time. It will need to be something new, because at present, the old guard have nothing to say, and very little worth listening to in practice.
"The American people are too smart to vote for a convicted felon. I, however, am not that smart"
-Nikki Haley