Why is Nikki Haley?

You are a spectator, not the audience

When Nimarata arrived in her chariot on the banks of the Jordan to slaughter 6 million Palestinians, the first and only word she spoke was "namaste"

Why is Nikki Haley? Why does Nikki Haley? She has no constituency. She has never been able to crack 10% in any GOP primary poll. She’s not running for vice president like Vivek. She doesn’t have a borderline money laundering arrangement to pay a farm team of consultants like Tim Scott or the other random black politicians (“but he’s so well spoken”) that run like clockwork every four years. She’s a poor investment if the play is to try to duplicate Carly Fiorina’s stunning inability to hurt Trump with suburban moms (turns out they don’t actually emphasize with passive aggressive ladybosses to the extent GOP apparatchiks do).

And why does anyone humor her? A mediocre governor who resigned halfway through her second term to take a seat-filling assignment at the UN, where she did nothing tremendously important for just shy of two years - mostly a literal spokesmodel, when she wasn’t undermining the administration by publicly contradicting the platform of her boss’s boss. This does not scream “gravitas”. At most she chose what to shriek about - Israel Israel Russia Syria (Israel).

She spends her days alternating between impotent complaints that people are being mean to her online, demanding a fresh war, and making sure Israel’s honor is defended on cable TV. These are not issues that animate the public. She isn’t even particularly good at advocating for them. Dime store Manichaeism about “Israel’s battle of good versus evil” is pure filler. It’s a Dean Koontz novel at the Walgreens checkout. Thrilling! And forgettable.

So what is all this for?

Nikki Haley is a walking billboard, the embodied “…and I bought this house with my OnlyFans”. The product she advertises is her slavish obedience to a very particular portfolio of interests, and the target is not you. You are just a spectator, the Guatemalan child allowed to stand on an apple box so you can see the Big Game (we do a little equity). The intended audience is people like herself circa a decade ago - lackluster backbenchers who wonder what their next move is.

It turns out, if you check the right boxes and shill the right interests, good things happen to you. From a functionally zero net worth in 2018, she now does Quite Well. Every line item in that income disclosure represents not some concrete value she created, but someone who personally took a shine to her. “Israel has a right to defend itself?” It’s like you’re telling me for the first time, babe - here’s a couple hundred thousand bucks in speaking fees. She draws a paycheck from obvious Israeli lobbying and intelligence efforts like “United Against a Nuclear Iran”, I guess for her unity, alongside her Mossad colleagues.

This pile of speaking fees and sinecures should be understood as payments for services rendered, rather than investments in some rising star, or to get on the good side of some officeholder with actual discretionary power, and her campaign as a way of promoting the Nikki Haley Deal. When her Punjabi visage is plastered all over CNN and Fox, no one is curious what she is going to say - everyone knows she’s going to do the bit. But when Governor Thudgurt (R, North Tenasippi) looks up at it in the airport, he thinks exactly one thing - “How do I get that Nikki Haley Deal?” Financing her presidential campaign has the same objective of putting anything else on daytime TV - “If you took an unusual interest in securing export permits for electronic warfare systems after your term was up, you may be entitled to compensation”.

On the off chance Trump is elected and needs appointments, this kind of advertisement of the neocon retirement plan has actual effects on personnel and policy. When your top level foreign policy officials, or even potential appointees, consider the Nikki Haley Deal, it’s easy to suborn them to undermine your efforts to actually shift American foreign policy. This is why Nikki sorely needs to be humiliated - she must be reconstituted from an advertisement to a warning to others.