With hopes for Nikki Haley dashed, we’re left with a worst case scenario | Opinion

I held out hope Nikki Haley could pull off the seemingly impossible and best Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. That hope is now gone even though the number of voters who participated in the Iowa caucuses is a sliver of the Republican primary base.

Trump secured a commanding victory while Haley duked it out with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who came in a distant second. Haley came in third, which simply wasn’t good enough. She needed to prove she had cleared DeSantis and was somewhat in reach of Trump. Neither of those things happened.

Even if she pulls off the seemingly impossible in New Hampshire on Jan. 23 — an outright victory — I fear the die has been cast. Trump seemed to know it. He felt so comfortable with the results he temporarily put aside his trademark crudeness to sound somewhat magnanimous while touting his first-place finish.

Barring direct intervention from God, Trump will be the 2024 GOP nominee. That’s bad. It’s bad because it means one of our two major political parties has decided its standard bearer should be a man who inspired an insurrection attempt. There is little that’s more anti-democratic than what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, an event Trump encouraged beforehand, seemed proud of during, and for which he has expressed no regrets since.

That day was only one aspect of a multi-prong approach to undo democracy because Trump and his supporters convinced themselves only one outcome could be legitimate, a Trump win.

I’ve heard liberals and left-leaning pundits declare there is no real difference between Trump and the rest of the Republican field. In some sense, that’s true. No matter if it is President Haley, President DeSantis, or President Ramaswamy, the GOP would pursue further tax cuts for the rich, provide even more support for Israel’s right-wing government than the Biden administration has, and treat immigrants as leeches who need to be exterminated rather than as fellow human beings. The GOP would double down on further undermining abortion rights and pursue more policies and laws that would make it difficult for teachers and professors to teach the truth about this country’s racial history.

In another sense, the claim that the rest of the Republican candidates are just like Trump couldn’t be further from the truth. Only Trump has the kind of support that would convince thousands of Americans to participate in a violent attack on our Capitol. Only Trump has a cult-like following convinced he’s an instrument of God. Conservatives want a Republican in the White House, just as liberals want a Democrat. That’s normal, healthy politics in a country whose foundation is essentially a two-party system. Sometimes the Republican wins, sometimes the Democrat. That’s as it should be, as it had long been — until Trump showed up.

There’s little evidence throngs of Americans enthralled by other candidates — Democrat, Republican or independent — are willing to overthrow the government even if it requires violence, the way Trump’s most ardent supporters have shown they are. It wasn’t even true for Barack Obama, who had two strong victories in which he won the popular vote, a feat Trump has yet to achieve once.

In at least some of his supporters’ eyes, Trump can do no wrong. In their eyes, he was great for the economy, even though he was the rare president who left office with a negative job creation record. In their eyes, he made the country safer even though the homicide rate spiked on his watch.

For all the flaws of the founding fathers, and they had plenty, they had the foresight to guard against absolute devotion to a single individual. Far too many Americans have ignored that wisdom, which is why a man like Trump represents a unique threat to our democracy.

It’s too bad Haley couldn’t work her magic to overcome the seemingly impossible, as she did twice in South Carolina to become the first, and so far only, female governor and non-white man to lead the Palmetto State.

This story was originally published January 18, 2024 at 9:53 AM with the headline "With hopes for Nikki Haley dashed, we’re left with a worst case scenario | Opinion."