Welcome to the Trash Heap of History, Nikki
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat her last.
This month, we have witnessed a parade of cowards passing before us on our TV screens: Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Little Marco Rubio, Uncle Tom Tim Scott, Cosplaying Elise Stefanik and J.D. Vance and other Republican politicians who refuse to commit to accepting the outcome of this year’s election, opting instead to feed Donald Trump’s Big Lie. Of course, they all know better. But, for them, caving to cravenness is the better part of valor.
Add to this circus of trolls Nikki Haley, who announced this week that she would vote for Trump — not a full-throated endorsement, mind you. But we’re splitting hairs here.
Many folks were expecting against hope that Haley would be the one GOP holdout. But, alas, as with the others, she has found that forging that Faustian pact with the Prince of Darkness is the better bet if one is to have a future in the “Unified Reich” to come, her decision a calculated one to try to preserve her political options within her party. A review of her record reveals an unsteadfast woman, finger always in the air, given to flip-flopping on any given issue, depending on what position would play best in the political arena.
Welcome to the trash heap of history, Nikki! You’ve now joined the ranks of a rich panoply of American cowards, traitors, mountebanks and other assorted sell-outs, from Benedict Arnold to Jefferson Davis to Axis Sally to Ernest Lundeen to Joe McCarthy and Bernie Madoff. Decades hence, scholars will define your legacy as a forgettable asterisk in American history, one of many examples in the Trumpian Era of cloying, obsequious figures whose lack of intestinal fortitude and commitment to principle were exceeded only by their blind ambition and lack of conscience.
The NYT’s Katherine Miller wrote:
Haley, as a political figure, is not especially focused on moral cases. The larger ones she made against Trump centered on electability and Ukraine in an ideological sense. Even in the late stages of her presidential campaign, she did not frame her criticism of Trump around Jan. 6 or anything similar but more around his recent behavior.
And Matt Bai said in the Washington Post:
History tells us that repressive movements enabled by cowards and hucksters are just as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the legitimately hateful. You can wreck a country with cosplaying careerists just as easily as you can with bloodthirsty revolutionaries.
Hitler acolyte Albert Speer, a highly educated man of good breeding, said his failing was weakness of character combined with overweening ambition. He said he wallowed in the reflected glory of Hitler’s power, hoping “to gather some of his popularity, his glory, his greatness, around myself.” But a historian said of Speer, “He knew exactly what he was doing, and he wasn’t duped or anything else. He was a sinner by omission and commission, and he went wading right in. His problem wasn’t blindness. It was blind ambition.”
A student of history, I’ve always been fascinated by such figures — some of the smartest people who prostitute themselves for self-serving ambition. (See: Please Do Not Feed the Whores, Parts I & II, The Lara Loganization of Maria Bartiromo, Elise Stefanik's Glass Eyes and other essays.)
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last,” Winston Churchill said.
Of all of Trump’s subjugated Republicans, Nikki Haley should have the presence of mind to know this.