Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
In a Republican presidential nomination contest that one might occasionally mistake for a normal race, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is facing what seems to be her do-or-die moment going into the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
In a Thursday night town hall on CNN she was her usual confident, passionate, smart self. But, as has happened throughout this peculiar GOP primary season, there was something missing. Was she really going after the man she needs to beat? Was she really aiming to defeat former President Donald Trump?
“We want to do better than we did in Iowa, that’s my personal goal.” Once again, it sounded like she was aiming for second place.
She has already lost Iowa handily, coming in third, behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with both trailing Trump, who dominates the polls of GOP voters. New Hampshire is the one early state showing her in striking distance, with a more moderate electorate than Iowa and a primary that allows non-Republicans to vote. The Granite State would seem to give the erstwhile UN ambassador her best chance of beating her former boss and vaulting into serious contention for the party nomination.
And yet, this is far from a normal election. After all, the leading GOP candidate is accused of trying to overturn America’s democracy and has given every indication that if he became president again, his second term would be more extreme and potentially a threat to US democracy.
Among the many out-of-the-ordinary traits of the contest, Haley has essentially ignored the most salient features of the man she has to beat, a candidate so flawed that his former attorney general, Bill Barr, has warned that Trump “will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests.”
Again and again on Thursday, Haley missed the opportunity to strike Trump where he is weakest. “There should be accountability” was about as far as she would go in addressing the behavior that has landed the former president in legal quicksand.
She could have mentioned the actions that resulted in two impeachments while he was president, a mountain of criminal and civil cases against him, more than a dozen accusations of sexual assault and his increasingly alarming rhetoric about plans to weaponize the government against his foes, or “vermin,” as he called some of them, once again using language favored by fascist propagandists. (Trump denies any wrongdoing.)
Instead, Haley’s offense mostly avoids the major flaws of her target. What passes for Haley’s attacks against her rival, heralded by the press only because there have been so few before, are limp arguments about how “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows [Trump].”
For a moment in the town hall, she did criticize some of Trump’s policies, including his praise of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. But on his most fundamental failings, she remained silent.
On many subjects Thursday night, Haley tried to lure independents, a big share of the New Hampshire electorate, at time sounding almost like a moderate campaigning in the general election rather than taking the highly partisan, increasingly extreme positions often heard in the primaries.
But when it came to Trump, her calculated timidity persisted even as Trump has launched transparently racist attacks against her, calling her by her foreign-sounding first name, Nimarata, and falsely claiming the South Carolina native is not qualified to be president because of her parents’ nationality at the time of her birth.
When host Jake Tapper gave her the opportunity to call Trump out on his racist dog whistles, Haley downplayed what she labeled his “name calling,” saying it’s what Trump does when he feels threatened.
What’s going on here? Is there any way that Haley can win the nomination without plunging her sword into any of Trump’s gigantic vulnerabilities?
Sure, there’s an outside chance she can pull off an upset win, carry New Hampshire and pierce Trump’s perceived cloak of invincibility, changing the course of the race. But there’s another way Haley can emerge victorious. That way has more to do with forces outside her control, although she apparently believes it requires her to hold her fire against her principal rival to avoid alienating his supporters.
While it’s possible her reserve in taking on Trump means she’s running with an eye toward becoming Trump’s vice presidential running mate or hoping to position herself as a leading candidate for 2028, there’s a path for her to win the nomination this year simply because Trump’s own way forward is filled with potholes and traps.
If Trump is disqualified, somehow unable to run or perhaps convicted and made too toxic even for his supporters, the space could clear for the GOP’s second-place finisher to step in and become the nominee. Call it the banana peel path.
The odds now strongly favor Trump’s nomination. But even if Haley and most of the rest of the current Republican establishment find the disturbing facts of Trump’s past, present and future too risky to mention, they loom large over the country – and the world’s – political and security horizon.
The inescapable reality is that Trump is in very deep legal trouble, and for very good reasons. His legal cases are extremely serious and his strategy of trying to delay all cases until after the election could fail.
Trump is also, as Haley has noted, an old man. He will be 78 on Election Day, and his lifestyle is not one that promotes longevity. He is obese, hasn’t always exercised as his doctors have recommended and already has a common form of heart disease. He also lives with stress most of us could hardly imagine, considering his legal woes, another factor that experts say is harmful to one’s health.
Trump’s supporters may not care that he has praised brutal dictators, that he faces multiple accusations of sexual assault, that he tried to overturn a legitimate election, or even that he suggested he would ignore US commitments to its allies under NATO.
The wheels of justice are grinding on, though. Most cases are unlikely to be resolved before the election, and it’s untested legal waters whether a convicted – or imprisoned – criminal can assume the presidency. Trump’s claim of absolute immunity, now before an appeals court, will go a long way in determining the timing of some of the processes.
But Trump has been charged with 91 criminal counts. He faces a volcano of legal troubles, with a potential sentence of decades in prison if convicted. He is being tried on charges of racketeering, of trying to overturn election results, of threatening national security by illegally taking to his country club home super-secret national defense documents – including on nuclear programs and US vulnerabilities to military attacks – and showing them to people without security clearances.
Courts have already ruled that he committed fraud in his business and that he committed sexual battery.
Even if Republican candidates, with few exceptions, seem oblivious to these extraordinary allegations of misconduct, the alarms sounded by those who worked with him during the Trump presidency are nearly deafening.
It’s another way in which this race is unlike any other. At least 17 Cabinet-level officials of the Trump administration are speaking out against him. The risk he poses is so great, they say, that some vow to campaign for Biden if Trump is the nominee.
This election is so far from normal, John Prideaux of The Economist concluded our vocabulary simply falls short: “words like ‘uncharted’ and ‘unprecedented’” won’t do. “America will need new [words] for this election.”
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But it’s not just a one-of-a-kind election because of Trump. It is also because of Haley, who despite facing what may be the most flawed, and certainly the most legally embattled, rival in the history of US democracy, said she would vote for Trump even if he’s convicted, and would pardon him if she’s elected.
She can only hope the road ahead includes something (legally) slippery that takes Trump out of the race.
