TWO telling remarks last week from within the ranks of prominent US Republicans gave an insight into the fears and acrimony that will be the hallmark of next year’s US presidential election campaign.
The first – not surprisingly – came from Donald Trump. Asked during a televised town hall event in Iowa by Fox News’ Sean Hannity if he “in any way” had “any plans whatsoever, if re-elected president, to abuse power, to break the law to use the government to go after people”, Trump’s reply was straight to the point.
“No. No. Other than day one,” Trump responded. “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill,” he insisted, referring to his intention to close the US southern border with Mexico and expand oil drilling.
When asked again later in the event, Trump went on to repeat his assertion. “I love this guy,” he said of the Fox News host. “He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one … after that, I’m not a dictator’.”
This of course is anything but a denial and only Trump would have the gall to admit to abusing power, when almost every other political leader, however authoritarian, would do all they could to portray their use of power as legitimate.
The second telling remark from within the Republican ranks came last Wednesday in the course of a contentious exchange between two of Trump’s rivals for the nomination as part of the Presidential Primary debate in Alabama.
Even without Trump’s presence – given he is well ahead of everyone else in the polls and skipping all the debates – two other candidates managed to trade verbal blows – the spiteful nature of which could have come straight out of the former president’s playbook.
The exchange between motormouthed tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley during a fiery discussion on foreign policy and support for Ukraine, was perhaps the unseemly low point. It was then that Ramaswamy made a sexist jibe at Haley, calling her hard-power policies “lipstick on a Dick Cheney”.
Both Trump’s denial of “dictatorship” and the exchange between Ramaswamy and Haley were all the signs any political observer needed of both the direction of travel another Trump term would take and the no-blow-too-low approach his Republican rivals are prepared to inflict on each other in beating him to the White House.
With such vituperative remarks already taking place within the GOP’s own camp, one can only guess as to the bitter exchanges we can expect when rival Republican and Democrat candidates get down to the real nitty gritty in next November’s election.
But as the exchange in Alabama last week showed, Trump’s rivals are not shy of throwing political punches either. Among the remaining favourites for the nomination are of course Chris Christie, who was once his ally and now his nemesis, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, outsider Ramaswamy and the target of his ire last week Haley, Trump’s former US ambassador to the UN.
Anyone watching the fourth primary debate last week though would be forgiven for thinking that Haley was the favourite to win the GOP nomination next year. Throughout the two-hour debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Haley was the target of a series of verbal broadsides from both DeSantis and Ramaswamy. While DeSantis accused her of “caving” on tough issues when the “media” or “left” comes after her and cosying up to China, Ramaswamy went all out denouncing her as “corrupt” and a “fascist” for suggesting that social media companies ban people from posting anonymously on their platforms.
“I’m loving all the attention, fellas,” Haley quipped at one point as the rivals broke off answering their own questions to focus on her. But writing in the wake of the debate in the US political magazine The Atlantic, staff writer Russell Berman wryly summed up the reality of Haley’s position suggesting that “what she’d love even more is about 30 additional points in the polls”.
Though still lagging considerably behind Trump who shows to be on about 45%, Haley’s campaign has gained prominence in recent weeks.
Such is her recent surge that many US polls now put her in a heated race for second place with DeSantis. In the three early-voting states of New Hampshire and her home state of South Carolina, she is now polling second behind Trump and battling DeSantis for second in Iowa, where the Florida governor has pinned his hopes.
Adding to this momentum is the fact that Haley has also picked up the backing of deep-pocketed Wall Street donors who seem increasingly convinced that the former diplomat is the Republican best placed to take on Trump at the ballot box.
Former House speaker Paul Ryan is said to have called Haley a “growth stock”. a nod to her potential as the best shot at beating both Trump and incumbent Democrat president Joe Biden.
Just these past weeks Haley secured the endorsement of a super Political Action Committee (PAC) backed by conservative billionaire Charles Koch. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a well-funded group that boasted nearly $75 million on hand at the end of June. Many within the group are also convinced that Haley is the candidate.
“Nikki Haley offers America the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era, to win the Republican primary and defeat Joe Biden,” said Emily Seidel, AFP’s chief executive.
Knowing that the frontrunner Trump could easily be tripped up by voters in Iowa and New Hampshire or that his legal woes including four criminal trials and 91 felony charges could begin to pose a serious threat to his election chances, there are many within the Republican ranks who see Haley as the candidate who can stay the course.
They know that momentum in politics, especially US presidential elections, can quickly change and the favourite can start to lose ground. That means the race behind Trump between Haley and DeSantis is the one to watch, with much hinging on the Iowa caucuses on January 15.
Just as Haley’s ratings improve so those of her nearest rival DeSantis are taking something of a nosedive as his campaign remains beset by internal wrangles.
Though at the start of his campaign, DeSantis was seen by many as a possible alternative to Trump, things since then have gone from bad to worse.
To begin with, Never Back Down, the top super Political Action Committee supporting the Florida Republican has gone through three waves of shake-ups and on one occasion fired its interim chief executive officer after less than two weeks on the job.
Polling too has gone in the wrong direction whereby DeSantis started out with a national number topping 30% but is now in danger of dipping into single digits. In the three early voting states the dip is even steeper despite the deployment of one-third of DeSantis’s campaign staff to Iowa.
American voters it seems have turned away from what they perceived initially as an able operator. This image was largely created by slick PR campaigning which many voters have since seen through, identifying DeSantis as a somewhat wooden candidate and lacking the capacity to think on his feet during debates.
In the four debates sanctioned by the Republican National Convention and aired on television, DeSantis has not performed well, as was again evident in the final debate last Wednesday before the primaries.
Once seen as the GOP’s heir apparent DeSantis simply delivered his prepared lines and again came unstuck when he attacked Haley for taking campaign money from Wall Street donors and being a corporate puppet. Her retort, which put the Florida governor back in his place, was that these were the same donors who had abandoned DeSantis, having identified him as a no-hoper.
The upshot from last week’s encounter between the two is that Haley has gained ground yet again.
According to a poll tracker by The Economist magazine, Haley has risen to within one percentage point of DeSantis, at 11% to the Florida governor’s 12%. Betting markets suggest that she has already overtaken him, with on average a 13% chance of winning the nomination, compared with just 6% for the somewhat staid, unconvincing DeSantis.
But while Haley – a former South Carolina governor and daughter of Indian immigrants – is having her moment, Trump remains the candidate to beat.
Some election watchers point out that having served in Trump’s administration as US ambassador to the UN, Haley knows her rival’s strengths and weaknesses well, a point she made recently to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
When he “senses one ounce of weakness, he topples you”, she says. If he runs into “any amount of strength, he walks away from you”, Haley told the newspaper in a recent interview.
Having gained a reputation in the Republican Party as a solid conservative who has the ability to address issues of gender and race in a more credible fashion than many of her peers, Haley has also pitched herself as a stalwart defender of American interests abroad. Her view though that Washington must continue to support Ukraine rankles with some Republicans including Trump.
“I’m not movable when it comes to what I believe, and I call you out like it is. He knows that,” she told the WSJ of Trump, who she also believes has “chaos” following him “wherever he goes”.
But even armed with such personal insights to help fuel her challenge to the former president, most election watchers still believe Haley will have her work cut out in snatching the nomination away for her fellow Republican and one-time boss.
“I don’t think you can look at the numbers right now and see much of a path for anyone other than Trump,” said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics speaking to Reuters last week.
Trump, according to aggregates of national opinion polls, holds anything up to a 50 percentage-point lead over Haley, with DeSantis also in the mix. Trump also has large leads in those early Republican nominating states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.
Having decided to skip the series of presidential primary debates the Trump camp is toughing it out when it comes to his rivals, especially Haley.
His campaign team have sought to belittle the debate process and for Republicans to unify around the former president.
“The battle for second place has become the biggest waste of time, money, and energy that politics has ever seen,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Make America Great Again Inc. She called the debate “a fake fight to satisfy their egos and please their billionaire puppet masters”.
Given Trump’s commanding lead, it’s perhaps understandable that many see the battle for second place as just a sideshow. But as Haley has repeated time and again, she does not see herself in the contest simply to come second.
“I envision an America where we rediscover our national purpose and our pride,” she told Americans watching the televised GOP debate last Wednesday.
As the primary contest looms, the picture will become clearer whether American voters see her as the candidate to help bring that about. There is always the chance too that Trump might yet trip up which would make next year’s showdown with Biden even more curious and compelling should Haley come through.
As Biden himself let slip at a Democrat campaign donors event in Boston last Tuesday, the night before the GOP debate: “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.”
For the moment though, Trump is running and remains well ahead. But with the past week having thrown up both his remarks on “dictatorship”, and DeSantis and Ramaswamy’s toxic swipes at Haley, there can be no doubt that things are just beginning to get kinetic.
Right now it might seem that this remains a contest for second place. But as American voters know well from recent experience US politics remains a volatile place and the outcome of any contest – including the Republican nomination – is far from certain.
