OPINION:
The beauty of Nikki Haley’s suicide run against Donald Trump is the ugliness it exposes in American big donor politics. That ugliness will be on full display this week in Manhattan, that bastion of flyover MAGA country. There, the sputtering Rockette Haley will sing and dance for what is shaping up to be her Last Supper come the South Carolina primary.
This is what Republican presidential politics has come to: A handful of self-interested billionaires still think they can buy the Oval Office and then use the last useful idiot standing in Mr. Trump’s way to make even more billions on the backs of blue-collar and middle-class voters.
Never mind that the first and second choices of these billionaires to take down Mr. Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, wound up like crash dummies in one of Tesla’s notorious self-driving cars. In the proverbial triumph of hope over Mr. Trump’s MAGA machine experience, these big donors cling to the Hail Mary that Ms. Haley offers. (The third time’s the charm.)
Why do these big donors not see their moneyed assault on Mr. Trump as a fool’s errand? Over the last year, the more Democratic insurrectionists such as Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg have piled on Mr. Trump to subvert the 2024 presidential campaign, the more Mr. Trump has risen in the polls.
By analogy, the more the big donors have tried to bury Mr. Trump under a mountain of cash, the quicker Mr. Trump’s MAGA base has jettisoned any Trump alternatives who took their cash.
That was Mr. DeSantis’ first — and ultimately fatal — mistake. At the height of his popularity, he publicly accepted the big bucks and bear hugs of the major donors and quickly descended into MAGA hell as an opportunistic puppet.
Mr. Scott was weaned on the campaign finance norms of the Senate, where it is far easier to pad one’s campaign coffers with special interest checks than build up a grassroots donor base a la Mr. Trump and disciples like Matt Gaetz. Mr. Scott, therefore, never developed any facility to do what Mr. Trump has turned into a fine art: Fund one’s campaign with small donors and thereby free himself from the bonds of moneyed politics.
With no real popular support even in her home state of South Carolina, Ms. Haley likewise had no base of small donors. With more ambition than political sense, she has thrust herself headlong into her 15 minutes of fame. With no small irony, and like both Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Scott, Ms. Haley has thereby foreclosed any chance of being on the Trump ticket as vice president.
Why are the big donors trying so hard to take out Mr. Trump? Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each donor is self-interested in his own way.
Take Wall Street hedge fund managers and financiers such as Ray Dalio, Larry Fink, Ken Griffin, Daniel Loeb, Paul Singer and Steve Schwarzman. Many have made billions by providing the Chinese with boatloads of American capital to export U.S. manufacturing to China’s sweatshops and pollution havens. Never mind the American blue-collar carnage this offshoring has caused across a Rust Belt decimated by divorce, suicide and alcoholism and an epidemic of overdoses of fentanyl, which is manufactured with chemicals from China.
Then there is the ultimate ingrate, Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. The last time I saw this pair of deuces, they were beaming in the Oval Office as Mr. Trump hung a Medal of Freedom around Miriam’s neck. As a thank-you to my old boss, Miriam has donated to Ms. Haley’s campaign, no doubt in the expectation that Ms. Haley will protect her casino interests in China better than Mr. Trump.
Of course, the dean of big donors is Charles Koch. For decades, he and his now departed brother Charles built the infamous Koch network. Every election cycle, this network showers millions on Koch political pawns who promise to keep America safe — and all of the Kochs’ chemicals, fertilizer, lumber, mining and petroleum interests safe — from even the most reasonable environmental regulations. And no one this side of MSNBC hates Donald Trump more than Charles Koch, precisely because the Kochs can’t control Mr. Trump.
Finally, let’s not forget the co-hosts of Ms. Haley’s Big Donor soiree in Manhattan — Mr. Trump certainly hasn’t. That would be more billionaires in Stanley Druckenmiller, Henry Kravis, Ken Langone and Cliff Asness.
What most or all of these big donors have in common are mansions in Aspen, Palm Beach, Southampton, Geneva and Paris. In stark relief, many in MAGA America can’t even pay their mortgages, and others sleep under cardboard on excrement-filled streets.
These billionaires also fly in private jets around the world — with always a pit stop in Davos. It is always from this mecca of globalism where the big donor elites and the politicians they have purchased love to lecture us about how to reduce our carbon footprints and why we must be taxed accordingly.
The only thing right about this very wrong picture is how vast swaths of America are quickly turning their backs on those who dare to take this big donor money.
Bye-bye, Nikki. Thank God, we hardly know ye.
• Peter Navarro served as manufacturing czar and chief China hawk in the Trump White House. This piece originally appeared at http://peternavarro.substack.com.
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