There's a great future in Nikki Haley's past

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I remember the first time I saw Nikki Haley. It was in a high school gym before the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Tim Scott, who was then a congressman, was holding a raucous town hall, and Haley was there to cheer him on. The first woman governor of South Carolina, the first Indian American ever elected to statewide office there, the youngest governor in the country. Whatever that "thing" is that talented politicians possess, Haley had it. People liked her, and more important, she seemed to like people. She talked with you, not to you, and made routine conversations feel special and important. She seemed to have unlimited potential.

Then she threw it all away.

No political figure better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley. There was a time not very long ago when she was everything the party thought it needed to win. She was a woman when the party needed more women, a daughter of immigrants when the party needed more immigrants, a young changemaker when the party needed younger voters, and a symbol of tolerance who took down the Confederate flag when the party needed more people of color and educated suburbanites.

When Donald Trump ran in the 2016 Republican primary, Haley stood next to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the candidate she had endorsed, and eviscerated Trump as a racist the party must reject: "I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president." She was courageous, fighting on principle, a warrior who would never back down. Until she did.

The politician who saw herself as a role model for women and immigrants transformed herself into everything she claimed to oppose: By 2021, Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA with comments like, "Thank goodness for Donald Trump or we never would have gotten Kamala Harris to the border." In one sentence, she managed to attack women and immigrants while praising the man she had vowed never to stop fighting. She had gone from saying "I have to tell you, Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten" to "I don't want us to go back to the days before Trump."

As a former Republican political operative who worked in South Carolina presidential primaries, I look at Haley now — as she launches her own presidential campaign, which she formally announced Tuesday — with sadness tinged with regret for what could have been. But I'm not a bit surprised. Her rise and fall only highlights what many of us already knew: that Trump didn't change the Republican Party, he revealed it. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the GOP into an autocratic movement. It's not that she has changed positions to suit the political moment or even that she has abandoned beliefs she once claimed to be deeply held. It's that the 2023 version of Haley is actively working against the core values that the 2016 Haley would have held to be the very foundation of her public life.

As governor, her defining action was signing legislation removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. This came after the horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and after social media photos surfaced of the murderer holding Confederate flags. Haley compared the pain South Carolina Black people felt to the pain she had experienced when, as a young girl named Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, she had seen her immigrant father racially profiled as a potential thief at a store in Columbia. "I remember how bad that felt," Haley told CNN in 2015. "That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate Flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling."

Then came Donald "you had some very fine people on both sides" Trump, and by 2019 Haley was defending the Confederate flag. In an interview that December, Haley told the conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the Charleston church shooter had "hijacked" the Confederate flag and that "people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage."

In her 2019 book, "With All Due Respect," the sort of autobiography candidates feel obligated to produce before launching a presidential campaign, Haley mentions Trump 163 times, overwhelmingly complimentary. In one lengthy passage, she insists that she was not referencing him in her 2016 Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union speech, when she called on Americans to resist "the siren call of the angriest voices." It is always sad to see politicians lack the courage to say what should be said, but sadder still to see them speak up and later argue any courageous intent was misinterpreted.

It didn't have to be this way. No one forced Haley to accept Trump after he bragged about assaulting women in the "Access Hollywood" tape. No one forced her to defend the Confederate flag. No one forced her to assert Trump had "lost any sort of political viability" not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she "would not run if President Trump ran," then prepare to challenge Trump in the primary. There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that's a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip.

Trump has a pattern of breaking opponents who challenge him in a primary. Haley enters the race already broken. Had she remained the Nikki Haley who warned her party about Trump in 2016, she would have been perfectly positioned to run in 2024 as its savior. But as Haley knows all too well, Republicans aren't looking to be saved. The latest Morning Consult poll shows Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida together drawing 79% of Republican primary voters. Ms. Haley is at 3%, one percentage point more than Liz Cheney.

The female star of the current Republican Party isn't the daughter of immigrants taking down the Confederate flag. It's Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sells "Proud Christian Nationalist" T-shirts while becoming arguably the second-most powerful member of the House in little more than one two-year term. If Trump wins the Republican nomination (and I think he will), he may well choose the election-denying loser Kari Lake as his running mate, not the woman who twice won governor's races the old-fashioned way: with the most votes once the ballots were counted.

There is a great future behind Nikki Haley. She will never be the voice of truth she briefly was in 2016, and she will never be MAGA enough to satisfy the base of her party. But no one should feel sorry for Haley. It was her choice.

Stuart Stevens is a former Republican political consultant who has worked on many campaigns for federal and state office, including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. This article originally appeared in the New York Times.