WASHINGTON — Nikki Haley has broken with Donald Trump in a move that puts her at the front of the potential Republican presidential pack for moderate conservatives.
US Ambassador to the UN was one of the major speakers at the 2017 AIPAC conference.
These include pro-Israel Jews who stuck with the party in the Trump years due mainly to his dramatically successful Israel-Arab foreign policy and other pro-Israel steps, such as moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus acknowleding Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
On Feb. 12 in a Politico interview, Haley said, “We need to acknowledge he [Trump] let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”
Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has a canny sense of when it’s time for conservatives to let go of driftwood. She removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state Capitol after a white supremacist gunned down nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015.
The move, which would have sparked protests a week before the killing, went down without a hitch.
Haley was until now one of the few Trump officials who managed to walk a fine line between distancing herself from some of him and earning his blessing by embracing his foreign policy agenda.
She has also been a star among pro-Israel Republicans for her loud, blunt and sustained defense of Israel and her pledge as UN ambassador to “take names” of countries that go against the US when it backs Israel.
She had emerged from the Trump years as a political survivor. Many GOP Jews will be happy with Haley’s decision and could help her with her presidential ambitions.
Haley made fighting anti-Israel policy the centerpiece of her UN tenure, removing the US from the UN Human Rights Council because it focused a grossly disproportionate amount of time on Israel.
She also took the lead in the US decision to cut funding for UNRWA, the UN-affiliated body that assists fifth-genereation Palestinian refugees, and which Republicans say supports terrorists and is perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (President Joe Biden says he plans to reverse both policies.)
Her frontline pro-Israel advocacy has made her extremely popular at the annual AIPAC conference, where she always earned the loudest cheers — the mere mention of her name by another speaker guaranteed applause.
She memorably coined the phrase that came to define her UN gig at the 2017 AIPAC conference: “I wear high heels. It’s not for a fashion statement, it’s because if I see something wrong I will kick it every single time.”
At the 2019 conference, after she had resigned from her UN job, she used her AIPAC appearance to launch her advocacy website, Stand For America, a typical stage setter for people contemplating a presidential run. The site solicits donations and emails.
She has a very warm relationship with Jewish Republican groups, including the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Many Jewish Republicans are disillusioned with Trump after the Jan. 6 riot. Fundraising among Jewish donors ahead of 2024 likely may be hard slog for any presidential candidate who is Trump-adjacent.
“I would certainly hope under any circumstance that our community shows their appreciation, in any endeavor that she undertakes,” Fred Zeidman, a Houston businessman who is a major Republican pro-Israel donor, said.
The more important effort right now, he said, was to steer the party away from association with Trump’s disastrous final months. “What Nikki is trying to achieve right now is to retake the House and retake the Senate.”
Haley’s 2019 political autobiography, With All Due Respect, includes a chapter — and chunks elsewhere in the book — on Israel policy, including her battles with Trump’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom she depicts as resistant to her advice to quit UNRWA.
She also gives four pages over to a topic that had no bearing on her UN responsibilities — the deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017. Trump’s response upset her enough, she writes, that she called him. She said he should be as unequivocal as she was after the Charleston massacre. He said the two situations differed.
“I replied to the president that the two situations were not really different,” Haley writes. She said she advised the president, “You have to stop acknowledging the haters.”
She and Trump had a kind of “strange respect between us,” she acknowledged in the book.
She describes being on the wrong end of a Trump tweet after attacking Trump at a rally for the candidate she backed in the 2016 presidential primaries, Marco Rubio: “The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!”
She replied on Twitter, “@RealDonaldTrump, “Bless your heart.”
“It was southern woman code,” Haley said.
“Three polite words that let the receiver know you mean something not so polite.”
Trump has vowed to return to the political realm in some capacity.
“I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she said. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”
The IJN added to this story.
