April 20, 2018

NIKKI 2018!:

The war party is ready for its next campaign: Haley 2020 (Daniel McCarthy, 19 April 2018, Spectator UK)

Nikki Haley is at war with Donald Trump. She may be his ambassador to the United Nations, but she wants to set a foreign policy all her own, closer to the global interventionism of George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton than to the muscular but restrained foreign policy that Trump campaigned on in 2016. Her differences with the president were on stark display this week, as she first announced sanctions against Russia that Trump had not approved, then shot back at the new director of the national economic council, Larry Kudlow, when he offered a diplomatic interpretation of her mistake. Kudlow ascribed her off-message remarks to "some momentary confusion," to which Haley responded, "With all due respect, I don't get confused."

Haley is every Never Trumper's favourite member of the administration, and the esteem in which she is held by the president's sworn enemies in his own party ought to put the White House on guard. 

Haley, Integrity Intact, Is the Exception to the Trump Rule (A.B. Stoddard, April 20, 2018, RCP)

Nikki Haley's surprising remonstrance, issued this week from under the bus, earned huzzahs from both parties and showed the world what successfully surviving service in the administration of President Trump looks like. It also showed the lady can throw some damn good shade.

After she appeared last Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation" and announced there would be new sanctions on Russia to follow recent airstrikes in Syria, the White House said the ambassador was mistaken. Larry Kudlow blamed it on "momentary confusion," to which Haley responded: "With all due respect, I don't get confused." Kudlow folded immediately and apologized. And the man of too many words used none -- a rare occasion when Trump himself held back.

Haley is an unlikely heroine in the ever unfolding drama that is the presidency of Donald Trump. She was an outspoken opponent of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and is the daughter of Sikh immigrants who smashed glass ceilings to become South Carolina's first female governor, the nation's first ever Sikh governor and the second ever Indian-descent governor. She has not stooped to the sycophancy most of her colleagues have, and without foreign policy chops has studied and worked her way to success in one of the highest-profile positions in U.S. government.

Posted by at April 20, 2018 5:22 PM

  

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