Nikki Haley’s greatest trick is convincing voters she’s a moderate

With a brand new endorsement from New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu in hand, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is poised to become the candidate of Republican moderates and the main alternative to Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primaries — or so claims one report after another. It’s an easy way to think about the race and the axis of disagreement within the Republican Party: the hard-right Trump on one side, the moderate Haley on the other. 

Some more moderate GOP voters will indeed be drawn to Haley, if only because she is not Trump. But this is not an ideological contest; the fact that multiple news outlets are framing it that way shows how misleading it is to fall back on old categories when trying to understand today’s Republican Party. 

When Trump seized control of the GOP in 2016, he scrambled its usual platform: discarding some traditionally conservative positions (such as support for free trade), embracing others (tax cuts, opposition to abortion rights), and even creating new standards separating “real” Republicans from RINOs (“Republicans In Name Only”). The most important standard was and still is support for Trump himself — not only merely his views but his very person, a figure of worship to whom true Republicans must abase themselves in the most abject way possible.

As an unusually shrewd politician, Haley has managed to dance around the pro-Trump/anti-Trump dividing line without ever placing herself neatly on one side or the other. She managed to serve two years as his ambassador to the United Nations and leave without having him turn on her in rage, unlike so many of the others who served in his Cabinet.

That history, and her opposition to Trump today, has nothing to do with ideology. Yet perhaps out of a vain hope that the Republican Party can become something it won’t, some persist in describing her as a “moderate.”

SC: www.msnbc.com

Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.es, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.fr, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro, Github.ro