Opinion

NERET: Why Nikki Haley Is The Neoliberals’ Favorite Republican

(Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

Eduardo Neret Contributor
Font Size:

Nikki Haley is campaigning to the wrong crowd. 

Her campaign would probably say that’s part of her strategy. To conservative voters, that’s exactly the problem with Nikki Haley: Republican primary voters aren’t Haley’s real constituency. 

The individuals Haley is truly trying to appeal to, the people whose opinions she cares about the most, are the neoliberal elites who run establishment institutions like the media and Wall Street banks. 

Tucker Carlson, my former boss, made this point over a year ago. I was with him in Iowa when he gave a speech explaining why Haley is unfit to lead the Republican Party. 

In the speech, Carlson recalled Haley’s response to George Floyd’s death in 2020. Just days after the incident (and notably before any facts had emerged) Haley tweeted that “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.”

“I thought, why should what happened between a cop and George Floyd outside a convenience store in Minneapolis be personal and painful to anybody,” Carlson wondered. “What are you even talking about? Oh you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re trying to please the people whose opinions you actually care about at The New York Times.” 

Carlson was and is, of course, right. He added that Haley’s tweet was a perfect example of why she’s unfit to lead the country. 

“The second things get intense and the second the other side really unleashes and starts yelling so loudly that you can’t think clearly — I want a leader who can still think clearly,” he said.

Nikki Haley may be a nice person and a good politician, but she’s not that type of leader. More often than not, she’s been the type of Republican who behaves exactly like the institutional left believes Republicans should. She is the media’s favorite Republican running this cycle, and it’s not hard to see why. 

For one, Haley believes in identity politics. She’s made her gender a central part of her pitch, from her bizarre comment about the “ammunition” in her heels at a primary debate to the campaign gear on her website. Haley sells bumper stickers and t-shirts that say “Sometimes It Takes A Woman,” which sounds more like Hillary Clinton than your average female GOP voter. 

When asked recently why minorities should vote for her, Haley didn’t cite any policy proposals. Instead, she answered, “I am a minority first, so I think I’m as diverse as it gets.”

In other words, Haley wants people to vote for her because she’s an Indian woman. That message has earned Haley praise from the media.

On Wednesday, NPR ran a piece titled “Strong but ‘feminine’: how Nikki Haley navigates gender as only woman in the GOP race.” The author wrote that Haley has been “highlighting the traits that make her unique … including her gender and her family’s immigration story.” As if those things weren’t obvious to voters.

It’s clear the media is attempting to rehabilitate Haley’s image on the left to make her more palatable to their audiences. 

After the first Republican debate, MSNBC host Joy Reid said Haley “seemed like a reasonable Republican politician who kind of made sense.” Comedian Bill Maher recently called Haley an “as-good-as-it-gets Republican.” A November piece in Politico said Haley was “consolidating the NeverTrump vote” among donors and organizers. 

Then there’s the support for Haley from the corporate establishment on Wall Street. Last month, fresh off declaring she would end limits on legal immigration and instead reform the system based on what corporations “need,” Haley met with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and other business executives to court their support. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is arguably the most significant proponent of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing in the United States. 

When asked after the meeting if she was concerned about those ESG policies, Haley ignored the question. Instead, she pointed to her record as governor and said, “I partnered with my businesses. I use them as a resource. One, they hire people that we need to hire. They help us with our economy.” 

Around the same time as Haley’s meeting with Fink, Axios reported that she had been having private conversations with J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. Days later, he publicly called on business leaders, even liberal Democrats, to support her. 

Perhaps even more important her ties to the neoliberal establishment is that Haley is a staunch proponent of involving the United States in foreign military conflicts like the war in Ukraine. By extension, Haley also supports enriching the defense contractors that benefit from those conflicts. In fact, no other Republican currently running can be counted on to protect that system — the military industrial complex — the way Haley would. 

That’s because Haley herself was part of it. She also directly benefited from it. 

As South Carolina governor, Haley signed over a billion dollars worth of economic development legislation for Boeing. The company rewarded Haley with a seat on its board just months after she left the Trump administration in 2018. That relationship, along with Haley’s work with several other companies with ties to the defense industry, gave a huge boost to her personal finances. As journalist Lee Fang reported earlier this year, Haley went from being over a million dollars in debt and having just $15,000 in a bank account to amassing a fortune worth over $12 million.

Amassing personal wealth is not in itself disqualifying. But Haley ingratiating herself with the defense industry is part of a pattern. At a time when conservatives increasingly want leaders to buck the establishment, Haley has been too willing to go along with it. 

Whether because of her own personal conflicts of interest, her general desire to be embraced in the mainstream and by donors, or simply her lack of courage, Nikki Haley has repeatedly shown conservatives that she can’t be trusted to take principled stances on controversial issues. 

Republicans deserve a nominee who represents them first, before the interests of Wall Street and permanent Washington. They want a nominee who will not cower when faced with criticism from the media establishment.

Not only does Nikki Haley fail to fit that bill, but she’s the exact opposite. There’s a reason why establishment forces are coalescing to prop up her campaign. Voters: beware of the moderate dressed in conservative clothing.

Eduardo Neret is a conservative writer and political commentator, and a former producer for Tucker Carlson.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel