One of the hazards of running for president is making a remark in front of cameras that quickly points out why you’re not the right candidate.
This brings to mind this recent, decidedly telling remark from former Gov./UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in her race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Haley said of former President Donald Trump:
The reality is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him, and we all know that’s true … and we can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.
Translation?
Haley, in a blink, made herself the symbol of what millions of Americans have come to see as exactly what’s wrong with the country. Her comment is a clear representation that she is first and last a supporter of what Americans have come to call “The Swamp.”
What is “The Swamp”? It is Status Quo Washington and the Status Quo Establishment in the country at large.
The Swamp could be corrupt Old Order bureaucrats in the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice trying to thwart, first, a presidential election that elects Trump. Then, when that failed in 2016, The Swamp spent four years seeking to disrupt the president and his entire administration.
The legal arm of the Swamp, whether in Washington, New York, or Georgia, has spent endless amounts of time to impeach and/or indict President Trump, deliberately weaponizing and corrupting the legal system to do so.
The Swamp includes a corrupted media that makes it its mission to not report the news that doesn’t fit The Swamp’s objectives. The suppression by Big Tech and Big Government of the 2020 New York Post exclusive about Hunter Biden’s laptop is exactly The Swamp at work.
On and on — and on and on — goes The Swamp in its obsession with controlling America and all of its different entities. The Swamp wants complete cultural and political control of America. Its players see themselves as having a God-given right to run America, whether they are in the federal bureaucracy, the media, academia, and more.
In a sense, it is an adult version of the cliques found in junior high school. There is the “in crowd” — aka the cool kids who, as I have written previously, “are popular, attractive, the star athletes.” Then there are their opposites, “the unfashionable outsiders … who are shy, socially awkward, and not as attractive — the geeks, the nerds, the un-athletic, and the unfashionably dressed, if exasperatingly smart, who aren’t invited to sit with the ‘in group’ at lunch in the school cafeteria and who don’t get invited to the popular girls’ slumber parties.”
And today’s Swamp dwellers are, among other things, all about virtue signaling. Enforcing Swamp conformity in sharing the same narrative. To send the message that “Hey, I’m one of you.”
That is exactly what Nikki Haley’s message attacking Trump as bringing “chaos” is all about. It is signaling to The Swamp that, Republican though she may be, she is really one of them — a Swamp devotee.
She is decidedly not about “chaos” that disrupts The Swamp. All of which Nikki Haley — and she is not alone — sees as “chaos.”
Why?
Because candidate Haley has made it abundantly clear with this attack that she herself supports The Swamp. She wants to be part of the “in crowd.” And to oppose The Swamp, to disrupt it, shine a spotlight on it, not to mention clean it up, is exactly the opposite of what she would do as president.
She would be a go-along-to-get-along champion of the status quo and Swamp corruption.
Let’s be clear. Donald Trump has the support he has from his fiercely loyal base precisely because he has had the guts to stand up to The Swamp, to disrupt its players and schemers, and return the country to its basic values — aka “Make America Great Again.”
So.
The Iowa caucuses arrives on Monday, with the New Hampshire primary less than two weeks after that.
And whatever else the results will show, they will show just whether Haley’s idea of campaigning as a Swamp candidate opposed to disrupting The Swamp — bringing “chaos” — will be a political seller.
Put me down as skeptical.
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