Nikki Haley has a glass jaw
Zachary Faria
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Nikki Haley’s baffling unforced error has made it clear that she has a glass jaw and less clear what exactly she is doing with her campaign.
Haley decided, seemingly unprompted, to make destroying social media anonymity a chief focus of her campaign, announcing that it would be one of the first things she would do once she took office. She declared that anonymous internet posts were a national security threat and that requiring everyone to identify themselves on social media would allow their family and community members to put social pressure on them only to post nice, socially acceptable content.
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That idea is terrible for a number of reasons, as my colleagues have written about in detail. Chief among them would be that this would immediately backfire on everyday conservatives. If CNN was willing to dox an anonymous Reddit user over a GIF they didn’t like, what would it and other liberal outlets do with immediate access to your identity?
More alarming, though, is that Haley continued to defend and promote this idea in the face of criticism. It wasn’t a one-off, throwaway line but an idea she was seemingly proud of and prioritizing. It is the first real scrutiny she has faced in her campaign, and it immediately caught her in a whirlpool of criticism. Worse still, this wasn’t the work of an opposition campaign. It was self-inflicted, which makes you wonder just what damage a real opposition campaign to Haley could do to her electoral chances.
Therein lies the problem with Haley. She has faced no scrutiny. Democrats and national liberal media spent about nine years attacking former President Donald Trump. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has weathered a sustained opposition campaign from the same forces for five years and from Trump and Haley in the past year, and he hasn’t put a foot wrong yet. Meanwhile, the first bit of scrutiny Haley has faced (which was, again, self-inflicted) has left her reeling.
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So, what exactly is Haley doing? Aside from making this terrible plan a centerpiece of her campaign, her strategy appears to be to knock DeSantis out of the race and face Trump one-on-one. But DeSantis’s voters will likely end up back with Trump, and that would then leave the full might of Trump’s campaign (and Democrats and the media) to rain down on Haley, who has avoided attacking Trump so far.
If anything, this debacle proves that Haley’s strong general election polling numbers compared to Trump and DeSantis are because her campaign has not been fire-tested as theirs have been. If this is how her first bout with scrutiny goes, how can she survive a sustained primary assault, let alone a sustained general election campaign from the Democratic Party’s allies in the media? Haley has proven that she has a glass jaw, and she may have just knocked herself out by putting her foot in her mouth.