What does Nikki Haley have to gain from defending Donald Trump? Potentially everything

Last Thursday, The Atlantic dropped a bomb that wasn’t really all that surprising. The President of the United States, that faux-patriot, had referred to Americans who had died in war as “losers,” and “suckers,” the magazine alleged; other outlets later confirmed this story (despite the predictable and repeated denials of the President himself). This might have felt indefensible to most — and yet some have defended it.

The most visible defender rushed to the President’s aid on Sunday. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, upon learning that Joe Biden’s camp would be using Trump’s quotes as fodder for a campaign video, said that the President has “tremendous love and respect” for American troops. 

Former Governor Haley was once touted as a rising star within the Republican Party, and so it may seem shocking that she would choose this particular moment to defend Trump. There are few opportunities, after all, that are as ripe for distancing as this one. What But what Haley’s comments show are that Republicans have actually learned something from this Trumpian era, like Pavlov’s dogs. It seems her drooling, power-hungry reaction betrays not a true belief that the president loves our troops, but, rather, a true belief that that Republicans will not be penalized for saying even the most disgusting, most outlandish things. Trump certainly hasn’t been.

If Haley’s goal is to be president someday (and many would argue that this is, in fact, her ultimate goal), she might as well toss out any semblance of ethos she once claimed to possess. As of 2016, ethos doesn’t matter. A president can show disdain for the troops without consequence. A political strategy of supporting said president is not necessarily a losing one, cast in this light. 

Haley has been, in fact, a student of the political moment. She has watched a man rise to power by employing every crass tactic in the book. She has stood by as Trump has faced no consequence for conspiring with Russia to rig an election; for hiring criminal after criminal for his administration; for debasing the Constitution; for dog-whistling at the extremist right (more like cow-belling, really); for inciting violence through his inflammatory rhetoric; for failing to act with any federal authority in a pandemic; for overseeing an economic collapse; for referring to women as pigs; for calling Black people thugs; and for always taking the side of the oppressor, in every imaginable scenario, wearing his racism like a cape.

More broadly, Nikki Haley, in her sad, aspirational way, is a stand-in for every Republican. Inaction — or, in Nikki Haley’s case, action, in the form of a mounted defense — has been a choice, dictated by learned behavior. Nikki Haley’s defense of the president shows that Republicans have learned one thing in the Trump era, and it’s that bad behavior is rewarded. Why be moral, when you can win elections? Why be decent, when you can get paid?

This may not have been the teachable moment we had hoped for in this fraught moment, but Haley, whom many had pinned hopes on, proves its truth. The point, for Republicans, is not to outlive evil, or to turn away from it. It is, instead, to use it as a stepping-stone to more power, since evil, it turns out, is plenty popular in its own right. The lesson Republicans have learned is one that the truly decent among us should take to heart: Trump has made winning the only important thing. Those who do not win, on account of morals or ethics, are only, after all, “losers” or “suckers.”