Nikki Haley has been running to lead a Republican party that no longer exists
Can we stop pretending now? After weeks of speculating by the media that perhaps Nikki Haley might eke out a win in New Hampshire – or at least lose by a percentage small enough to make continuing in the race reasonable – she lost by a wide margin.
Before we had been offered various rationales for why, just maybe, this wouldn’t happen. Haley, after all, had recently come into a flush of donor money at the end of 2023, as the field dwindled and she was left alone as the last almost-plausible non-Trump candidate. She’d put much of that money into New Hampshire, a state whose Republicans tend to hew more moderate. (Haley, a rabid conservative but one who does not seem to oppose the rule of law outright, is what passes for “moderate” in today’s Republican party.)
There was also the force of history to consider, the fact that primary campaigns of either major party do not usually look like this. When there’s such a big field, as there was in this Republican cycle, normally New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary can have quite a bit of sway, helping to advance the strongest contenders and cull the stragglers.
But this year there were only two people really running by the time New Hampshire rolled around, and one of them loomed much larger than the other – both in fundraising and in his power to animate the public. It was like watching a race between a whale and a minnow: he lapped her without seeming to try.
One word for the 2024 Republican primary contest is “anticlimactic”. But considering how completely Trump has captured the imagination of his party, it is possible that the real story is not about how easily he has trounced his challengers, but that there were so many challengers in the first place.
What possessed so many Republicans to run against Trump? Were they delusional? Hopeful? Cynical? Had they missed the memo on what their party had become – a personality cult devoted in total service to one man? Or did they think, somehow, that he was weaker than he was?
Perhaps this was the idea of the Trump imitators. Whiny, pleading Ron DeSantis hoped that if he demonstrated enough cruelty in Florida, his home state, Republican voters might admire him as strong, and forget how annoying he is. He was Trump without the charm.
Nasally, scheming Vivek Ramaswamy attempted to channel Trump’s snake-oil salesman pitch for nostalgia, punishment of enemies and exaggerated promises; he was Trump without the movement.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey best known for shutting down the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor who had crossed him, was the only Republican willing to attack Trump, building his campaign around severe, self-serious intonations about the former president’s danger to the nation. But it was impossible to take Christie seriously: he could not convincingly feign honor.
Maybe it was fitting, then, that Haley was the last one standing: though she was equally misguided, she was doing something different from her fellow candidates. Haley’s campaign, focused on a revival of a hawkish neoconservative foreign policy and a comparative de-emphasis of social issues, seemed uncannily retro and anachronistic – a 90s-era Republican wearing a 21st-century blazer set.
Hers was a campaign that talked about a generational shift and played up Haley’s relative youth (she’s 52), but which also seemed to wish for a return to the political past, attempting to proceed as if Trump had never happened.
Who could look at today’s Republican party – animated by racist and misogynist zeal, in thrall to short-sightedness and bigotry, harnessed around petty grievances and functionally largely, for its base, to entertain – and think that what such people wanted was a competent, cool-headed and strategic woman of color? Only the most naive people in the world could think that. Haley, at least, was willing to take their money.
In debates, Haley talked about the virtues of foreign military involvement and played up her own discipline and competence. There might be arguments for all this, but they are clearly not arguments that the Republican party base wanted to hear: foreign wars remain unpopular in post-Iraq America. (Trump’s pivot to an “America First” isolationism seems to have returned Republicans to a Lindbergh-esque hostility to the outside world for the foreseeable future.)
And things like competence, selfdiscipline and hard work are qualities that tend to render women into useful, serviceable minor characters – the sort of background figures who can be useful to a man of showmanship and bombast.
One of the most plausible explanations for Haley’s campaign has always been that she is actually running for vice-president. This might be the role she is best suited to play: that of a bridge between the old-guard establishment Republicans and the new, permanently Trumpist reality.
But it’s unclear how much of a reconciliation is really needed there. After his landslide victory in Iowa, the big donor money has once again flowed to Trump; reporters at Davos issued dispatches detailing how the global rich have made their peace with Trump’s possible return to the White House.
The old-school Republicans that Haley represents have never been as far from Trump as it would benefit their egos to pretend. The national war hawks, the corporate rich: these people do not need the democracy that Trump threatens. And in a few days or weeks, when she inevitably drops out of the race and endorses Trump, Nikki Haley will discover that she can live without it, too.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Who could look at today’s Republican party – animated by racist and misogynist zeal – and think that what such people wanted was a competent, coolheaded and strategic woman of color?
did receive a nomination for his performance as Ken, released a statement that bristled with righteous fury at the snubs. “There is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally celebrated film,” he wrote. “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius. To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”
While it’s fine to question the complete validity of his statement – the Oscars always nominates five people for best director and 10 movies for best picture, which makes this sort of snub statistically quite likely – you can’t argue with the fact that Gosling has his finger right on the pulse here. The world was lost and confused when Gerwig and Robbie weren’t nominated, but in one fell swoop Ryan Gosling was able to give voice to all the frustration.
It was a canny move because there is a universe in which Gosling’s nomination made him the villain of the story.
As the meme shared by your more basic friends on Instagram yesterday explained, a man getting the credit for a woman’s work is sort of the entire point of Barbie, and so it wouldn’t be hard for public opinion to turn on him for precisely this reason. But by defending Gerwig and Robbie so trenchantly, that isn’t going to happen now.
It also marks another step in an awards season where he’s barely managed to put a foot wrong. During Jo Koy’s flaming crater of a jokeless and weirdly defensive Golden Globes monologue (during which he made a crack about Barbie’s “plastic boobies”), the defining reaction was Gosling’s. As the camera cut away to him, perhaps hoping for a smile, the world saw him scowling at Koy in exactly the same way that they were probably scowling at Koy. And when his song I’m Just Ken won a Critics’ Choice award, his reaction – best described as blankly stunned incomprehension – also managed to reflect the public mood.
If you’re looking for the exact opposite of this, of course, then seek out
Oliver Stone’s recent criticism of Gosling. Earlier this week Stone said that Gosling was “wasting his time” by appearing in films such as Barbie, which he said “contribute to the infantilisation of Hollywood”. The backlash to his comments was so overwhelming that Stone was forced to tweet out a screengrabbed Notes app apology, in the traditional manner of the publicly shamed.
You could read Gosling’s Oscar statement as a reaction to this, too. Ever since Barbie was released, Gosling has been extremely all-in on the film, promoting it with such sincere fervour that you might have been forgiven for thinking that he single-handedly financed it. Ryan Gosling has always completely believed in Barbie, and his place within it, so his statement also works as a shot against any detractors who simply saw it as a heavily marketed bubblegum film based on an extremely popular toy IP.
As such, expect all eyes to be on Gosling when the Oscars roll around in March. He has so far demonstrated a perfect eye for the public mood, and as such has become the figure through whom we will experience the ceremony. There will be cutaways to him when Barbie wins anything, and even more pointed cutaways when it doesn’t. He still isn’t likely to win his award, because at this point Robert Downey Jr is such a lock that the other nominees don’t even need to show up. But that doesn’t matter, because Ryan Gosling is now more than that. He is the people’s best supporting actor nominee.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that America Ferrera was also nominated for Barbie, and she also voiced her scorn over the Gerwig and Robbie snubs. But everyone decided to focus on Ryan Gosling instead of her because, again, that’s sort of the point of Barbie.