The long-awaited first Republican challenger to Donald Trump for 2024 is apparently arriving shortly, and I wrote about her at New York:
Ever since Donald Trump formally announced a 2024 presidential comeback bid last November, the big question has been when, exactly, one of the large number of potential Republican rivals would jump into the turbulent waters with him. There were credible reports that potential candidates were afraid to draw Trump’s concentrated fire. But now the Charleston Post & Courier reports that Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, will take the plunge on February 15.
The timing of the Haley announcement is odd, coming right after a show of force by Trump in South Carolina. At his January 28 event in Columbia, he demonstrated his support from the state’s Republican governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, senior U.S. senator, and three U.S. House members. Perhaps Haley is just playing catch-up or is concerned about preempting a rival presidential bid by the junior U.S. senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott (whom she appointed to the Senate). The Dispatch’s David Drucker believes she actually relishes the prospect of a one-on-one fight with Trump in the early going:
“What better way to distinguish herself versus Trump, DeSantis, and anyone else, than by becoming the second declared candidate in the primary? The contrast is stark. Republican voters can choose between a white, male, soon-to-be 77-year-old defeated former president who has led the GOP to three consecutive electoral disappointments, or a nonwhite woman in her early 50s, born of immigrant parents, with conservative bona fides on most critical issues that are unassailable.”
Being the first official Trump challenger will definitely provide priceless advertising for Haley’s on-paper credentials. In addition to the qualities Drucker mentions, Haley has checked the foreign-policy-qualifications box via her service at the U.N., something Ron DeSantis can’t match. She has shown excellent political instincts over her lengthy career (she got massive positive publicity for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds long after it had become a low-risk endeavor). Most of all, she has excelled in the essential Republican art of staying on good terms with Trump without looking like his toady.
Indeed, Haley’s odd relationship with Trump may soon be in a bright spotlight. She has offended him on multiple occasions, first by endorsing “L’il Marco” Rubio in 2016 while criticizing Trump, then by unsubtly letting it be known while serving in his administration that she was an independent player, then by harshly attacking his conduct on January 6. You can add to her sins against the 45th president that she is now breaking a promise to back him in 2024 if he ran. Yet he’s never gone medieval on her, and he seems strangely affectionate toward her even now, according to the Post & Courier:
“During his weekend campaign swing that included a stop at the S.C. Statehouse, Trump told national reporters he recently received a phone call from Haley. Trump said Haley told him ‘she’d like to consider’ a 2024 run of her own.
“’I talked to her for a little while. I said, “Look, you know, go by your heart if you want to run,'” Trump told reporters, adding that he would welcome the competition.
“’She called me and said she’d like to consider it, and I said you should do it.’
“Trump then reportedly told Haley, ‘Go by your heart if you want to run.’”
It’s possible this last comment from Trump should be translated as “Go ahead! Make my day!,” suggesting that he is prepared to tear her a new one in the weeks and months ahead. Or maybe he’s simply not that worried about Haley compared to the bigger threat posed by DeSantis.
So what kind of threat to either of these men is Haley ’24? Yes, she is the sort of candidate that might have been thought up by central casting. Originally, she was a politician from the hard-core, Jim DeMint-Mark Sanford wing of the South Carolina GOP who fit the Tea Party mood like a glove. But then she gradually made herself into a national-media icon of what post-Trump Republicanism might look and sound like. To conservatives of every hue, she’s unimpeachable on cultural issues, unobjectionable on foreign policy, and especially distinguished in the evergreen hobby of union-hating (she anticipated DeSantis’s attacks on perfidious corporations back in 2014 by telling potential investors in her state that they could take their “union jobs” elsewhere).
Haley’s ultimate problem as a presidential candidate is that she’s from a crucial early primary state. As Tom Harkin (whose presidential candidacy in 1992 took Iowa right off the table) could tell her, you don’t get much credit for winning your home state. But if she loses South Carolina, her candidacy will be dead as a mackerel.
Haley’s other big challenge is to overcome the perception that she’s really running for vice-president. She has been regularly featured on veep lists for Trump (even back in the 2020 cycle, when there were reports that the then-president wanted to dump Mike Pence in favor of her). And there’s not much question that Republicans need help with women voters, having placed a woman on their national ticket only once. And maybe that is her goal, or at least an acceptable consolation prize; despite years of being treated as a Republican star, Haley is only 51. But she’d better not wind up looking too weak in her home state, or the largely superficial image she has built as a political world-beater could vanish like a rare snowfall in the Carolina sun.
My memory of Rubinomics associates it with bringing down the interest rate and reducing the deficit, rather than free trade. This apparently has changed in the post-election discussion.
The benefits of free trade have not been shared, no doubt. The “free” part has been taken by opportunists to mean free from the need to share gains or mitigate pains. Populists are right to shut down the store until accounts are set up correctly.
But the other side of Rubinomics is no less difficult. Getting the budget under control. Debt service and the retiring baby boomers are going to set up an impossible situation. Remember, off-the-books borrowing from Social Security and Medicare funds is not only going to stop, but will need to be reversed simultaneous with the ballooning debt service.
Clearly fiscal responsibility means revenue increases. Tax increases? Not on the middle class. That is the Democrats bargain with the voter in the past election. And we’d better not renege on that. The 1994 election, if you’ll recall, was demagogued by the Gingrich and the Republicans using very meagre tax increases.
Where then? I’d like to see somebody else’s ideas. I would first end the cap on payroll taxes. This would have the effect of increasing the top marginal rate by 16% or so for earned income, earmarked for the entitlements that will be needing it.
Symbolically, it might be neat to institute a new top marginal rate of 80 or 90 percent on income over $3 million.
An idea that is not mine, but I forget where I saw it, was to get rid of all the income tax deductions and credits and bells and whistles in favor of five: children, pensions, health care, education, mortgages. This might net the most, while holding the middle class harmless.
“Taxes” won’t be such a dirty word if it is applied to the other guy.
“Free” vs. “Fair” Trade
As the Rubinites and the economic populists square off on a number of issues which includes the free versus fair trade debate, the narrow use of the term “fair” trade by some Democrats borders on a disguised and thus disquieting form of rank economic nationalism.
Free trade is not fair trade when our government, thanks to powerful and well-heeled lobbies, refuses to couple “free” trade with the abolition of the patently inefficient subsidization of cotton, wheat, and sugar production in this country, among other such supports. These subsidies underwrite a monied elite while increasing the price of these products for consumers, not to mention the denial of economic opportunities for foreign workers. (Here in Florida, for example, we not only subsidize “big sugar” and thus pay more for our sugar, but we also subsidize their cost of doing business by using tax dollars to clean up their despoilment of the Everglades.)
An example of this “fairness” is reflected in the draft free trade agreement with Peru. As drafted, its implementation would demolish the Peruvian wheat, cotton, and sugar industries, for even with their lower wage rates, they cannot compete with the artificially supported low prices for these products.
Some Democrats are calling for better labor and environmental laws and their enforcement, which in Peru’s case could be strengthened, but this call is being made without any discussion whatsoever of the “unfair” destruction of three Peruvian industries.
The money we waste on welfare for industries that don’t need protection could be better spent on the social nets necessary for a fair trade driven economy.
In short, if the economic populists are going to argue for fair trade then they should use that term consistently to apply not only to our trading partners but to ourselves as well.