Question du jour – why are the Democrats (which includes the mainstream media) supporting Nikki Haley? I mean, they expect to win in November, right? So why do they care who the Republican nominee is? Some of it can be attributed to TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), which will always be with us... and of course they don't want Trump to have the “honor” of being nominated (for the 3rd time) by the Republicans, even though they fear and despise the “MAGA terrorists”, i.e. Trump supporters within the Republican party (and those not in the party as well).
It's clear that they aren't playing the long game here. They're getting their jollies by piling on Trump and whoever consents to be his running mate (“I pity the fool...”), but think about this. If Haley winds up being the nominee – and the Dems are doing everything in their power to make certain that Trump can't be nominated – and then loses, the Republican party will survive (if only in the usual minority status). That is, the mainstream Republicans – the “acceptable opposition”, the ones who are always happy to “cross the aisle” and be second-class citizens to the Dems – will take over once and for all, with Trump and the MAGA crowd finally sent into exile and relegated to the ash heap of history.
That would be a perfectly acceptable outcome for the Democrats. Having the Republicans as a perpetual and obseqious minority – which they have been for much of the time in recent years – would feel like business as usual, and the so-called two-party system would survive, at least in theory.
But the Democrats don't want a two-party system – not really. In their heart of hearts, they want a one-party system on the Soviet model, i.e. no opposition at all, not even the acceptable kind. Nothing but unanimous votes in Congress (and eventually one TV network, one radio network, one newspaper (OK, the Soviets had 2)... not to mention, no elections!). So what is the best way to make this happen, or at least to get a head start? It would be to throw Haley under the bus and allow the Republicans to nominate Trump, and then see to it that he loses, at which point the Republicans (meaning all of them, even including the RINOs) could be declared dead and buried along with their MAGA minority.
Now, you might say that Trump and the Republicans lost in 2020, but recovered – and this in spite of the fact that he was the sitting president at the time, and it's rare for a sitting president to be defeated for a second term. But the Democrats and their allies in the media and elsewhere will, by November, have had 4 more years to not only continue to brand Trump as Hitler Incarnate, but also to brand his followers as terrorists and put many of them in jail (and him as well, perhaps) – this process being well under way right now, and proceeding at warp speed. “Our very democracy is at stake!” – cry the mainstream media with one voice.
So the contrasts are much more stark now than in 2020 or 2016 – and this is mainly because the Democrats and the media have declared this to be the case. So the strategy of supporting Haley makes sense in the short run, but in the long run the Dems would be better off if Trump ran again and lost, because from then on the Republicans would be required to hang their heads in shame (for “putting us through this again”) and be paraded around wearing dunce caps by the Red Guard, and be reduced to a bunch of vaporous ghosts (think of 100 Mitch McConnells) wandering aimlessly around Washington while the Democrats establish a people's republic.
(PS – the Dems show no signs of wanting to push Biden aside (or Harris either), despite rumors to that effect. A president who is content to follow orders and read, even if haltingly, from scripts, and a vice president who is satisfied with a portfolio of sinecures, is exactly what they want; it has worked for three years, and it will work for one plus four more.)
(And BTW, Nikki Haley is playing her own game here. She's staying in the race, at least in part (in my opinion) because she expects the Dems/media/courts to take Trump out well before the election, at which point she'll be the last, um, person standing. That's the short game. The medium game would be for her to save a lot of time and money by dropping out now – or at least appearing to – and then wait for Trump to be neutralized, at which point she can come back on stage and save the day like Mighty Mouse.)
It's going to be very interesting to see how these various games intersect over the next few months. In fact, the mainstream (non-MAGA) Republicans may even decide to nominate Trump (assuming he hasn't been disqualified) for the same reason that the Dems would favor this – to insure his defeat, and thus the resounding defeat of the MAGA wing, thus leaving the mainstream unchallenged in their slouch toward obscurity. I'm not sure if they're capable of this kind of subtlety – they are called “the stupid party”, after all – but it would certainly win them friends on the other side – or let's say enemies disguised as friends.
