In late April during a Fox News interview, 2024 GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked about the lawsuit Disney filed against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, which alleges “a targeted campaign of government retaliation” that Disney says “threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”
Haley’s response was to go full corporatist, touting what she says was her record as South Carolina’s governor when it came to attracting businesses to the state and inviting Disney to bring their “70,000+ jobs” to her home state. In a tweet she posted, Haley took a direct shot at DeSantis, ripping a page out of fellow 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s playbook in the process.
“SC’s not woke, but we’re not sanctimonious about it either,” she wrote at the time.
Haley was widely criticized over her remarks, not simply because it was an attack on DeSantis but also because the consensus among most conservatives seems to be that it is non-negotiable that whoever the eventual GOP presidential nominee is has to be willing to go the distance on fighting against the worst elements of what the Democratic party and their willing accomplices in Woke Corporate America have in mind for this country.
Here we are some two weeks later, and instead of smoothing out the edges or softening her attack on DeSantis on this particular issue, Haley is doubling down, hilariously calling him “thin-skinned” over the feud with Disney and noting that he allegedly took $50,000 in donations from them as though a politician taking money from a corporation and then turning around and calling them out over their harmful political activism on issues involving children is a bad thing:
This line of attack is just dumb, for reasons I pointed out above. I mean a politician not kowtowing to a company just because they gave them a lot of money is supposed to be a good thing, right?
Also, another related jab she threw at DeSantis – which is not in the above clip – wildly missed the mark for reasons I’ll explain in a minute.
During her interview with Brody (full video here, the DeSantis comments start at around 12:55 mark), she suggested that DeSantis was not being decisive by continuing to put off a possible presidential campaign announcement, and declared herself to be a “decisive person” which is allegedly why she threw her hat into the ring back in February.
But she left out some inconvenient facts in her rant, most notably that she was not, in fact, “decisive” when it came to what was unquestionably the most divisive issue in modern South Carolina history: The Confederate flag continuing to fly on state Capitol grounds.
While Haley is largely credited for being the main figure behind getting the flag taken down after the racist mass murders of nine black Emanuel AME church members in Charleston, South Carolina in June of 2015, for years prior to that, both as a state legislator and then as governor, Haley repeatedly dodged on the issue even as the NAACP’s boycott of the state was costing South Carolina millions every year in lost revenue from businesses and sporting events.
The Washington Post did a surprisingly thorough and fair timeline of Haley’s extremely wishy-washy stance on the issue during her time as a South Carolina politico, which began to evolve after the mass shooting. Since then, she has tried to inject the “nuances” of the issue into the discussion and angered a lot of people on both sides of the debate in the process.
Further, the “decisive” Haley has gone back and forth on Trump, saying in 2016 that he was unfit for office and then turning around and working in his administration. And then once she left, she was critical of him again and said America needed to move forward from the Trump years.
And strangely enough, here she is, echoing Trump’s bizarre attacks on DeSantis regarding his war on wokeness in what for many on the conservative side is one of the defining issues of our time.
If one didn’t know any better, one would think Haley is auditioning to be Trump’s vice presidential nominee should he win the nomination again. In fact, I don’t know any better, so that’s what I’m going with. Because nothing else about Haley’s blatherings about DeSantis of all people being “thin-skinned” when he’s about the only Republican out there on “our side” taking the fight to everyone it needs to be taken to makes a lick of danged sense.