Let’s look at the serene hypocrisy of Nikki Haley

Astonishingly, some people still see Nikki Haley as one of the “good” Trump Cabinet members, the future of a more tolerant and accepting Republican Party. Haley hopefuls want to believe that a conscience might yet emerge from Trump’s Team of Liars, that the GOP’s latest showcasing of a Can-Do Immigrant Success Story can somehow undo years of xenophobia.

This requires listening to only half of what Haley says.

But if you listen to the full spectrum of her rhetoric, Haley clearly wants to capture the base that yearns for Trumpism — and to occupy the moral high ground of the postTrump era. She wants to tout the credential of having served in a presidential Cabinet (she was Trump’s U.N. ambassador) — and bask in recognition for having left of her own accord. She wants to criticize Americans’ obsession with identity politics — and highlight her own identity as a significant qualification.

There are plenty of reasons to approach Haley with wariness. Even in short-term-memory Washington, rife as it is with wafflers and flip-floppers,

the serene hypocrisy of Nikki Haley stands out. She wants it both ways — and she wants it her way most of all.

Take a glance at the inconvenient record. Here is Rebranded Republican Nikki Haley, who told Politico she was “triggered” by the 2015 slaughter of nine parishioners inside Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, that she was disgusted by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, that she was “disgusted” by Trump’s treatment of Mike Pence. And here also is Red-blooded Republican Haley, who in earlier interviews for the same 2021 Politico magazine profile rolls her eyes at the possibility of Trump’s impeachment, warmly recalls checking in on the disconsolate former president — a man she called her “friend” — and emphasizes “the good that he built.”

Haley is accustomed to internal contradiction, having been plucked from the South Carolina governorship to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, a position Trump reportedly chose her for because it removed her from the governorship.

Throughout her career, Haley has enjoyed the image of herself as an underdog and outsider willing to stand up to her party. But exposing and exploiting racism in the Republican Party isn’t the same as confronting it head on. Nor has she risked doing so except in rare moments. While governor of South Carolina in 2015, Haley called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the state Capitol — but only after the murderous rampage of an avowed white nationalist. A 2010 video recently shown by CNN reveals this less as a moment of principled bravery than of political expediency

With equal dexterous flair, Haley emphasizes her relative youth at 51 (“a new generation of leadership”), her identity as a woman and her Indian heritage as the child of immigrants while repeatedly condemning identity politics. “I don’t believe in that,” she said while campaigning recently in South Carolina, before neatly wrapping up with “As I set out on this new journey, I will simply say this — may the best woman win.”

According to a recent poll, Haley is 1 point ahead of Pence, currently exciting about 5% of Republican voters. It’s on voters to decide, when choosing between her and those Republican candidates who are ideological to their core, whether they prefer a candidate with no core at all.