Nikki Haley goes rogue
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and one of the highest-ranking women in the Trump administration, became the latest of the president’s men (and women) to veer off script and speak, well, candidly. Haley told an interviewer on CBS on Sunday that the women who had accused President Trump of sexual misconduct “should be heard, and they should be dealt with.” Then after acknowledging that Trump’s accusers had been heard from before the election, she added, “I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.”
Granted, Haley did not say she believed the women. But she didn’t try to discredit them. That’s in stark contrast to the president and his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who’ve said the women lied, the issue had been addressed during the campaign, and that was that.
Haley now takes her place next to the handful of other prominent administration officials who have dared to break ranks with the president — or whose private criticisms have gone public. From all appearances, these bursts of candor have not been well received.
For instance, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who reportedly called Trump a “moron” when speaking privately with several officials, has been marginalized and undermined repeatedly by Trump on North Korea and Iran. And Gary Cohn, the White House’s top economist, saw his chances of leading the Federal Reserve evaporate when he called on the administration to more clearly condemn hate groups after Trump repeatedly refused to hold the organizers of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., responsible for the violence that left one person dead.
The more people there are surrounding Trump who can pull him back when he goes off the rails, the better for all of us. That’s a function of not just his appointees’ willingness to take a moral stand, but also Trump’s evidently limited ability to put up with it. After Tillerson’s last falling out with Trump, one of the rumors circulating in Washington was that the secretary of State would be fired and Haley would replace him. Her interview on “Face the Nation” no doubt changes that calculus.
Kudos to Haley for speaking up on sexual misconduct in general and treating it with the seriousness it deserves. It’s either courage or calculation on her part; the former governor of South Carolina may believe that showing independence from Trump is good for her future political prospects. Either way, her remarks are a significant acknowledgment from within the administration that even the president’s conduct — albeit his conduct before he ran for office — is fair game for scrutiny.
On Monday, a day after Haley said women have every right to speak up, that’s just what a group of women who have accused Trump of varying degrees of sexual misconduct did at a news conference in New York. They demanded an investigation by Congress; unfortunately, Republican leaders there have been largely unwilling to call Trump to account for anything.
Their allegations that Trump kissed and groped them in ways that they neither invited nor wanted had all been aired during last year’s campaign. More than a dozen women stepped forward with accusations when Trump was a candidate. He denied them all, and yes, he won the election.
Yet those accusations were lodged in a very different climate from what we are experiencing now. The harsh public reckoning that the revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein unleashed, which spread swiftly through Hollywood and the media industry, is now filtering into politics and forcing the resignations of a growing number of elected officials. Trump’s accusers and his denials haven’t been tested in this new era of justifiable outrage at and zero tolerance of sexual harassment.
In recent weeks, Trump has publicly and aggressively supported Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, an accused sexual predator. The president has downplayed the allegations against Moore, even when other supporters have not and his own daughter Ivanka has said she has “no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts.” Trump insists that he respects and loves women. But with his dismissive attitude toward those who allege sexual harassment, he fails to live up to these claims.