Haley wants independence from Trump, but she is obviously well aware of the political risks of indulging that freedom too much.
A lot of what she says in this Wall Street Journal op-ed is sensible: Republicans should defend a lot of Trump’s policy record while also being willing to criticize some of his actions. “Some Never Trump and Always Trump Republicans also attack anyone who doesn’t join the all-or-nothing chorus.” I hear that.
She’s going to call it like she sees it. Except in some cases. She writes, “Mr. Trump’s legal team failed to prove mass election fraud in court.” Might that be because there wasn’t evidence of mass election fraud? And might the lack of evidence suggest that there wasn’t mass election fraud? She carefully avoids saying what she thinks.
Why is she writing this op-ed in the first place? Obviously because she is unhappy with the profile that Tim Alberta wrote for Politico, a profile that depicted her as having flexible beliefs, especially about Trump. That’s the backdrop to her complaint that the media “wants to stoke a nonstop Republican civil war.”
But it’s not Alberta’s fault that Trump made wild, baseless claims about the election, or that Trump’s post-election campaign led to violence, or that first Nikki Haley and then Mitch McConnell criticized him over it, or that Trump has returned fire against McConnell. Does the press have incentives to dramatize a Republican “civil war”? Sure. Has it invented it? No.
Haley hasn’t maintained an even-handed posture of praising and criticizing Trump as warranted, either. She criticized his post-election campaign once the riot happened — after being silent for weeks beforehand — and then went back to defending him (“give the man a break”) as it became clear most Republican voters were standing by him.
Haley wants independence from Trump, including the freedom to criticize him, but she is obviously well aware of the political risks of indulging that freedom too much. She has made sudden swerves in how she talks about Trump as a result, and is now pretending she hasn’t. The rest of us can see the constraints she is under without feeling bound by them — and can approve the idea of avoiding “Never Trump” and “Always Trump” excesses while wondering if it will prove possible in practice.