Reading through the ambiguous to vaguely positive remarks made by Republican pols about the historic auto workers strike, one of them jumped off the page, and I wrote about it at New York:

One of the great anomalies of recent political history has been the disconnect between the Republican Party’s ancient legacy as the champion of corporate America and its current electoral base, which relies heavily on support from white working-class voters. The growing contradiction was first made a major topic of debate in the 2008 manifesto Grand New Party, in which youngish conservative intellectuals Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argued that their party offered little in the way of material inducements (or even supportive rhetoric) to its emerging electoral base. Though Douthat and Salam were by no means fans of Donald Trump, the mogul’s stunningly successful 2016 campaign did follow their basic prescription of pursuing the economic and cultural instincts of white working-class voters at the expense of doctrinaire free-market and limited-government orthodoxy.

So it’s not surprising that Trump and an assortment of other Republicans have expressed varying degrees of sympathy for the unionized autoworkers who just launched a historic industry-wide strike for better wages and working conditions. But there was a conspicuous, even anachronistic exception among nationally prominent GOP politicians: South Carolina senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott. As NBC News reported:

“It’s the latest of several critical comments Scott has made about the autoworkers, even as other GOP presidential candidates steer clear of criticizing them amid a strike at three plants so far …

“’I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.’”

Scott’s frank embrace of old-school union bashing wouldn’t have drawn much notice 40 or 50 years ago. And to be clear, other Republicans aren’t fans of the labor movement: For the most part, MAGA Republicans appeal to the working class via a mix of cultural conservatism, economic and foreign-policy nationalism, nativism, and producerism (i.e., pitting private-sector employers and employees against the financial sector, educational elites, and those dependent on public employment or assistance). One particularly rich lode of ostensibly pro-worker rhetoric has been to treat environmental activism as inimical to the economic growth and specific job opportunities wage earners need.

So unsurprisingly, Republican politicians who want to show some sympathy for the autoworkers have mostly focused on the alleged threat of climate-change regulations generally and electric vehicles specifically to the well-being of UAW members, as Politico reported:

“’This green agenda that is using taxpayer dollars to drive our automotive economy into electric vehicles is understandably causing great anxiety among UAW members,’ [Mike Pence] said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Other Republicans followed suit, with a National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson calling out Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin — Democrats’ favored candidate for the state’s open Senate seat — for her Thursday vote allowing state-level limits or bans on gas-powered cars as choosing her ‘party over Michigan.'”

More strikingly, Trump, the 2024 presidential front-runner, is planning to hold an event with Michigan workers at the very moment his GOP rivals are holding their second debate next week, notes the Washington Post:

“While other Republican candidates participate in the Sept. 27 event in California, Trump instead plans to speak to more than 500 autoworkers, plumbers, electricians and pipe-fitters, the adviser said. The group is likely to include workers from the United Auto Workers union that is striking against the Big Three automakers in the country’s Rust Belt. The Trump adviser added that it is unclear whether the former president will visit the strike line.

“Trump’s campaign also created a radio ad, to run on sports- and rock-themed stations in Detroit and Toledo, meant to present him as being on the side of striking autoworkers, the adviser said.”

There’s no evidence Trump has any understanding of, much less sympathy with, the strikers’ actual demands. But in contrast to Scott’s remarks endorsing the dismissal of striking workers, it shows that at least some Republicans are willing (rhetorically, at least) to bite the hand that feeds in the pursuit of votes.

Meanwhile, the mainstream-media types who often treat Scott as some sort of sunny, optimistic, even bipartisan breath of fresh air should pay some attention to his attitude toward workers exercising long-established labor rights he apparently would love to discard. Yes, as a self-styled champion of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private- and homeschooling at the expense of “government schools,” Scott is constantly attacking teachers unions, just like many Republicans who draw a sharp distinction between public-sector unions (BAD!) and private-sector unions (grudgingly acceptable). But autoworkers are firmly in the private sector. Maybe it’s a South Carolina thing: Scott’s presidential rival and past political ally Nikki Haley (another media favorite with an unmerited reputation as a moderate) famously told corporate investors to stay out of her state if they intended to tolerate unions in their workplaces. For that matter, the South Carolina Republican Party was for years pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of violently anti-union textile barons. Some old habits die hard.

One of the useful by-products of the current wave of labor activism in this country is that Republicans may be forced to extend their alleged sympathy for workers into support for policies that actually help them and don’t simply reflect cheap reactionary demagoguery aimed at foreigners, immigrants, and people of color. But Scott has flunked the most basic test threshold compatibility with the rights and interests of the working class.

 

Now and then some of my Democratic and independent friends get enchanted with a Republican pol who seems to be standing up to the MAGA folk. There are a few, but there are also those who invariably try to have it both ways, and I wrote about one at New York:

Campaigning at the Iowa State Fair recently, 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley sported a T-shirt with the legend “Underestimate Me … That’ll Be Fun.”

As a longtime critic of her record and the relentless self-promotion that has obscured it, I wouldn’t for a moment underestimate Haley. She has world-class political skills and an instinct for the main chance that has served her well — it dates back at least to the 2010 gubernatorial campaign in which this Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin protégée exploited nasty smears accusing her of sexual infidelity to transform herself into the victim and vanquisher of the ex-Democratic “good old boys” who had dominated the state GOP for years. Similarly, in 2015 she got massive favorable press around the world for taking down a Confederate flag at the statehouse after a white-supremacist massacre at a Charleston church made such a step no longer controversial (a previous Republican governor had proposed taking down the flag 20 years earlier). She has managed to make that “courageous” stand the only thing that national political observers remember about her governorship, instead of more characteristic moments such as her rejection of any corporate investment in her state that might involve “union jobs.”

More recently, her virtuoso efforts to pose as both a loyal friend of Donald Trump and the symbol of a post-Trump Republican Party infuriated New York Times columnist Frank Bruni into calling her out: “Past Haley, present Haley, future Haley: They’re all constructs, all creations, malleable, negotiable, tethered not to dependable principle but to reliable opportunism.”

Bruni was enraged by Haley’s characteristically crafty performance in the first Republican debate last week, which showed, in his mind, what the candidate could represent if she flatly repudiated Trump and the MAGA creed. Indeed, she attacked Trump’s presidential record from the right (criticizing him for signing the then–wildly popular CARES Act), called him unelectable, and savagely took down Trump mini-me Vivek Ramaswamy’s Trump-adjacent foreign-policy views. But in a moment of truth, she raised her hand when the candidates were asked if they would support Trump as the presidential nominee even if he becomes a convicted felon.

The debate also gave Haley the chance to rehearse her latest rap on abortion policy, which has been getting rave reviews from those across the ideological spectrum (including Bruni) who don’t seem to understand that her “reasonable” approach simply means recognizing that Republicans don’t have the Senate votes to impose the national ban she would eagerly sign. As abortion-rights advocate Jessica Valenti explains, Haley is again confecting a “moderate” image out of thin air:

“Haley … tried to position herself as moderate on abortion by repeating something she’s said multiple times on the campaign trail: ‘Can’t we all agree that contraception should be available? And can’t we all agree that we are not going to put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty if she gets an abortion?’

“It’s a scary state of affairs when ‘I’ll allow you birth control and won’t kill you’ is something a candidate says to show they’re the reasonable one of the bunch …

“Just by virtue of not being yet another man saying a stupid thing about women’s bodies, she’s ahead of the game. But despite all the sweet ‘pro-woman’ messaging, Haley’s policies are no different than any of those men’s. She just hides it better.”

The question now, though, is whether this supreme opportunist has created a real opportunity for herself as a viable presidential candidate who will perhaps replace the ever-struggling Ron DeSantis as the defender of and rival to Trump with the best chance to emerge if the 45th president’s campaign somehow collapses.

Haley has gotten reams of publicity (most of it favorable) for her debate performance; she especially outperformed her fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott, who had previously been the back-of-the-pack candidate to watch. And now, a leading pollster for Trump has let it be known in a deafening stage whisper heard by Axios that Haley is “surging” in the early states:

“Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio is telling Republican donors that Nikki Haley ‘has surged’ in Iowa since last week’s GOP presidential debate — and that she and Vivek Ramaswamy are essentially tied with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire, according to a polling memo obtained by Axios.”

Lo and behold, another pollster, working for the DeSantis campaign, has also leaked private polling results showing Haley gaining ground in Iowa but not at the expense of DeSantis, who is surging even more.

Both of these polls should be taken with a shaker of salt since Team Trump and Team DeSantis are strictly focused on damaging each other, even if that means temporarily showing progress by a third candidate (in this case, not one who was doing very well prior to the debate). In public polling, Haley is at 4.9 percent (and fourth place) in the national RealClearPolitics averages; she’s at 4.6 percent (and fifth) in Iowa and 3.8 percent (and seventh) in New Hampshire. And it’s important to note that a lot of those who loved Haley’s debate performance won’t be in a position to vote for her in the primaries. As the Washington Post reported, its postdebate polling showed that, among Republicans, the “winner” was DeSantis at 29 percent, closely followed by Haley’s punching bag, Ramaswamy, at 26 percent, and with only 15 percent thinking she was the star.

So unless Haley is enjoying a boom that has yet to fully appear, she needs more breaks to become a viable candidate, and that’s assuming anyone is truly viable against Trump. If she does become a threat to the top two candidates, they’ll probably stop ignoring her, and, particularly if Trump begins eyeing her with malice, her careful dance at the periphery of MAGA-land may become much more difficult. Displacing Chris Christie as the most prominent anti-Trump candidate is not a recipe for success. But if she leans back into her periodic loyalty to the former president, she could fall prey to the irrepressible suspicion that she’s really running for the vice-presidency, a suggestion she has contemptuously dismissed without ruling it out. You do have to wonder if Haley’s frequent predictions that Kamala Harris would soon become president if Joe Biden wins in 2024 involve an element of projection. Becoming president without having to win a presidential nomination is every political opportunist’s dream.

Whenever a major political figure mangles history, I’m there to fight back, as I did this week at New York when Vivek Ramaswamy said some very strange things:

In the first Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley got in a good jab at Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech tyro who was presenting his strange views on world affairs: “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.” Never mind that Haley’s foreign-policy experience as Donald Trump’s mouthpiece at the United Nations hardly makes her Henry Kissinger. She’s right about Ramaswamy. His erratic suggestions for selling out Ukraine and Taiwan as part of some Risk-style geopolitical maneuver have now been revealed as reflecting a factually undernourished version of U.S. foreign policy that the candidate explained in a manifesto at The American Conservative.

It’s no surprise that Ramaswamy brands his proposed “doctrine” as president with the MAGA (and pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist) battle cry of “America First.” It also figures that he’d trace his hostility to “entangling alliances” back to George Washington, who famously warned against such invitations to the dominant European powers of his era to send wooden warships across the Atlantic (a relatively low threat today). I’d also give the boy wonder credit for touting the Monroe Doctrine as providing a loophole by which even enemies of U.S. troop deployments in Europe or Asia can nonetheless rattle sabers at Mexico.

But the identity of Ramaswamy’s real foreign-policy hero was indeed a surprise: “Though I often pay tribute to George Washington, when it comes to foreign policy, the president I most admire is Richard Nixon.”

Ramaswamy is famously a millennial; he was born 11 years and one day after Nixon was forced from office in disgrace. And his judgement about modern Republican chief executives is reflected by his description of Trump in the aforementioned debate as “the best president of the 21st century.”

Still, Ramaswamy’s extended shout-out to the Tricky Dick is so weird that you wonder if he’s just trolling old boomers like me for whom Nixon represented a low point in the presidency and a threat to democracy exceeded only by you-know-who. Here’s what he says about the 37th president (the only one to resign):

“Against the chaotic backdrop of the 1960s, where battles over ideas spilled into the streets, Nixon asserted a cold and sober realism. He formulated peace in the Middle East, while maintaining only the lightest-possible military footprint there. … He got us out of Vietnam.”

In fact, the “cold and sober” realist Nixon’s approach to war and peace was encapsulated by his determination not to become “the first American president to lose a war.” He was coerced by Congress and public opinion to end the Vietnam War five years after he became president. Fully a third of U.S. casualties in Vietnam occurred on his watch. And while he did gradually shift ground-forces responsibilities to a South Vietnamese government he helped turn into a corrupt U.S. puppet regime, he escalated the U.S. air assault on North Vietnam and launched U.S. troops into Cambodia in an expansion of the war that destabilized that country and opened the door to the Khmer Rouge genocide.

As for the Middle East, the “lightest-possible military footprint” included unprecedented U.S. military assistance (at its time more dramatic than today’s U.S. assistance to Ukraine, which Ramaswamy opposes) and the only DEFCON alert (placing the U.S. nuclear arsenal on a war-readiness footing) between the Cuban Missile Crisis and 9/11.

Another egregious Ramaswamy offense to the Nixon legacy involves his claim that the old Cold Warrior despised sweeping ideological claims in foreign policy:

“In his day, many useful idiots populated the foreign-policy establishment, and he rejected their influence. Under Nixon’s leadership, the engines of state were turned from universalist language to, as he put it, driving local actors to take the “primary responsibility of providing the manpower for [their] defense.”

Actually Nixon’s own role model in foreign policy was the virtual inventor of liberal internationalism, Woodrow Wilson, as the University of Virginia’s Miller Center observes:

“Richard Nixon recognized the power of Wilson’s legacy when he returned Wilson’s desk to the Oval Office in 1969. Nixon saw himself as the president who would establish a new, Wilsonian world order of stability and collective security to replace the Cold War confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s.”

If Nixon shrank from direct U.S. responsibility for molding a world in America’s image, it was mostly because of domestic opposition and the profound unpopularity of troop deployments.

Now even if you don’t mind the many liberties Ramaswamy has taken with Nixon’s foreign-policy legacy, the question must be asked: What is the man thinking? He can call himself an outsider and entrepreneur all he wants; right now he is a politician playing the political game at the highest level. Of all the many figures in U.S. history he could cite as exemplifying the foreign-policy values he offers the country, why would he choose a man mostly known for amoral abuses of power and betraying his oath of office? Yes, Ramaswamy adores the president who makes Nixon look like a piker in this respect. But even Trump knows enough to choose a former president as his own foreign-policy exemplar whose sins are conveniently very distant from our own time, and who was known in his own time simply as “the Hero,” Andrew Jackson.

Even Richard Nixon’s admirers wouldn’t call him heroic, so we are left with the impression that Ramaswamy is being pointlessly provocative. After the Republican debate, Congresswoman Madeleine Dean quoted Succession character Logan Roy’s words to his squabbling children: “You are not serious people.” If Ramawamy wants to be thought of as a serious candidate for president, he’d best stop talking about foreign policy for a while.

The GOP presidential debate offered fresh evidence of that party’s total disarray on abortion, as I explained at New York:

One of the essential tasks of a political party chair is to spin like mad when your candidates say and do unfortunate things. That’s the only way I can interpret this upbeat comment from Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel after the first Republican debate in Milwaukee:

“Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said the discussion about abortion during Wednesday’s Republican debate was part of an important path forward for the party.

“’I was very pleased to see them talk about abortion,’ McDaniel told Fox News on Thursday morning. ‘Democrats used that in 2022 … If our candidates aren’t able to fend a response and put out a response, we’re not going to win. They’re going to do it again in 2024. And I thought all of them did a really good job on that.’”

The idea that Democrats were able to “use” the abortion issue in 2022 because Republicans wouldn’t talk about it is ludicrous. The vast majority of GOP politicians greeted the Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade with emotions ranging from unbridled joy to paternalistic satisfaction. In any event, Democratic gains attributable to abortion-rights sentiment were triggered not by talk but by the actions of Republican legislators and governors in red states across the country who rushed to ban abortions to the maximum extent allowed by state courts.

The even bigger problem with McDaniel’s claim that Republican jibber-jabber on abortion will help its candidates is that they manifestly aren’t in agreement about what should be done in the post-Roe era, and in the areas where they can find common ground, their position is unpopular.

In Milwaukee, several candidates were asked if they support a national abortion ban. This is, in fact, the most relevant abortion-policy question for those running for federal office, particularly since most major anti-abortion organizations (a key constituency in the GOP since at least 1980) support — nay, absolutely insist upon — such a ban as an urgent priority.

Ron DeSantis has managed somehow to avoid answering this question for many months, even as he signed a near-total abortion ban in his own state that he brags about in conservative religious circles on the campaign trail. That didn’t change in the debate. Instead of addressing a national ban, he went off on a lurid tangent involving an alleged survivor of live-birth abortions — an exceedingly rare phenomenon that anti-abortion activists cite incessantly as the omega point of largely fictional Democratic “abortion on demand” policies.

A less hammer-headed evasion was executed by Nikki Haley, who has made a “realistic” rap on the political infeasibility of a national abortion ban something of a signature. Haley argues that while a national ban might be great policy (albeit hellish for the women whose interests she claims to value and and even represent), there’s no point talking about it because it would face a Senate filibuster even if Republicans controlled the White House and Congress. As the Cut’s Andrea González-Ramírez observes, a Senate majority could exempt abortion policy from the filibuster just as it has exempted key presidential appointments and budget matters. But the idea of an immutable pro-choice filibuster is a convenient dodge for Haley, a career-long anti-abortion extremist who now poses as peacemaker and compromiser.

Haley’s “realism” aroused the ire of Mike Pence, for whom supporting a national ban is a “moral” commitment on which compromise is impossible. Likewise, Tim Scott raised the specter of all those babies being murdered in Democratic states like California and Illinois. But then Doug Burgum pointed out that Republicans (and, indeed, anti-abortion activists) for nearly half a century had claimed abortion policy should be decided by the states, a position he still holds.

Maybe Ronna McDaniel can explain to us which candidate response to basic questions about abortion policy is going to do the trick in eliminating the Democratic advantage on the subject. Unfortunately, the one thing all the candidates on the Milwaukee stage had in common is that not one of them acknowledges abortion as a basic reproductive right. That was the bedrock tenet of Roe v. Wade, and it’s why polls consistently show sizable majorities of Americans expressing opposition to the reversal of Roe. For that matter, as state ballot initiatives constantly show, upwards of a third of rank-and-file Republicans believe in a right to choose abortion. So opposing that position while fighting over (or evading) the question of what happens when abortion is no longer a right is not a good look for the GOP. Perhaps if Donald Trump had shown up in Milwaukee, he could have repeated his earlier claim that the party’s unpopular views on abortion — not reticence in articulating them — had lost Republicans the 2022 midterms. His preferred approach of campaigning on other issues and then going after fundamental rights when he has the power to do so is safer politically.

There are all kinds of scenarios you can read about late challenges to Donald Trump’s very likely Republican presidential nomination. I decided to rain on one such parade at New York:

Among the Republicans who are scheming to prevent Donald Trump’s third straight presidential nomination, there seems to be a notion that if the GOP presidential field him can be winnowed in Iowa and New Hampshire, some savior of the party will emerge and beat him in a one-on-one fight. The argument seems to go back to a highly debatable (I’d actually call it wrong) proposition: The large field of rivals was the crucial factor in enabling Trump to win his first nomination in 2016. But even if it were true that a smaller field could have vanquished Trump in 2016, he’s arguably a much stronger candidate right now than he was eight years ago. For example: He’s currently at 55.8 percent among Republican voters nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. In 2016, he did not hit 50 percent in any national poll prior to nailing down the nomination in May.

Still, some say we should ignore the national polls and just focus on the early state races that could produce a Trump-vanquishing champion. That’s exactly what New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu argued Monday in a New York Times op-ed:

“The best indicator of Mr. Trump’s strength is looking to where the voters are paying attention: in states where candidates are campaigning, television ads are running, and there is a wide range of media attention on every candidate.

“In Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states that will vote in the 2024 Republican primaries, Mr. Trump is struggling. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, he is consistently polling in the low 40 percent range. The floor of his support may be high, but his ceiling is low.”

I wouldn’t call a candidate who has a 26-point lead in Iowa (again, per the RCP averages) and a 30-point lead in New Hampshire one who is “struggling” in those two states. Sununu appears to assume anyone who is not for Trump now will never support him, which wasn’t true in 2016 (when he gained strength every time a rival dropped out) and isn’t much supported by the evidence of Trump’s high favorability numbers among Republicans today.

At some early point, if Trump keeps winning big, he’s going to become unbeatable. No Republican candidate who has won both Iowa and New Hampshire has ever been denied the presidential nomination. Will Trump be the first? It sure sounds like another of those Establishment Republican fantasies whereby Trump is regularly underestimated.

Indeed, the bigger question about the early states in 2024 is whether Trump will have nailed down the nomination before the field is small enough to give anyone a clean shot at the heavy front-runner. Several candidates (notably Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy) are focusing mostly on New Hampshire; they aren’t going to drop out after an underwhelming performance in Iowa. Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are likely to hang onto their candidacies fanatically until their home state of South Carolina — the fourth state to vote — holds its primary in late February.

Even without the post-Iowa winnowing Sununu is counting on, it’s true there is a history of New Hampshire voters interrupting the premature victory celebrations of Iowa winners in both parties. Is it possible an Iowa win by Trump would be Pyrrhic, dooming his candidacy?

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once you examine the recent Republican candidates who have won Iowa and then quickly succumbed in New Hampshire and beyond. In 2008, 2012, and 2016, Iowa was won by Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz, respectively. Huckabee barely had two nickels to rub together; Santorum and Cruz upset national front-runners (Mitt Romney and Donald Trump) who came back to crush them in New Hampshire and later primaries. None of these doomed Iowa winners are in anything like the position Trump is in right now.

Anything’s possible in politics, and Trump’s legal troubles could in theory extend the contest for the nomination even if he’s winning initially (though so far those legal troubles seem to be helping him among Republicans). Candidates should definitely plan beyond the earliest states even if they are unlikely to be around for, say, Florida (where Trump and DeSantis could wage a dual home-turf battle) or Georgia (where Trump’s rivals are angling for an endorsement by Trump’s nemesis Brian Kemp).

But the odds say Trump’s rivals better beat him or at least give him a scare in Iowa, where it’s possible to punch above your weight with a superior ground game. It’s also a state the 45th president lost in 2016. If he romps there, he’s probably all but a lock for the nomination, barring crazy developments. And all those pleas to candidates to get out of the way of a fictional Trump-slayer will represent a waste of time and energy.