Following her distant third-place finish in Monday’s Iowa Caucuses, Nikki Haley and her media cheerleaders are framing next Tuesday’s New Hampshire Primary as a decisive one-on-one matchup with President Trump in which she stands a chance for an upset win.
Unfortunately for Haley, this week her real base of political supporters is 3,798 miles away from New Hampshire in Davos, Switzerland, wheels-down in its private jets attending the annual self-congratulatory World Economic Forum confab of globalist elites.
At just about every turn in the GOP primary race, Haley has demonstrated she’s at heart a Uniparty globalist who has little if anything in common with the grassroots, America First Republican base.
Big Wall Street donors who a year ago supported Ron DeSantis as a viable alternative to Trump, have in recent months jumped from the Florida governor’s life raft onto the Nikki dinghy following his dramatic plunge in the polls.
Last month, the former UN Ambassador hoovered up $500,000 in one night “at a massive fundraising event in New York Monday attended by top Wall Street financiers,” according to CNBC.
Billionaire JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon, a Haley supporter, recently urged even Democrat donors to open their coffers for her, telling elite attendees at another Davos-like annual gabfest, the New York Times DealBook Summit, “If you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you to help Nikki Haley, too. Give them a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump.”
And they are heeding his words. The week after Dimon’s plea, Big Tech Democrat donor Reid Hoffman forked-over a quarter million dollars to Nikki’s Super PAC. Hoffman’s camp made his objective crystal clear, with his top political adviser telling the Washington Post, “We have two shots to take out Trump, and we better use them both.”
This is an easy move by Never Trump Wall Street donors of both parties, because unlike DeSantis, Haley swims entirely in their lane ideologically on their biggest virtue-signaling priorities, including unlimited Ukraine funding, climate zealotry, and maintaining an open border.
Following Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Haley parroted the Uniparty talking point that the conflict represented an existential threat to the U.S. and the West as a whole.
“This is not just a war with Ukraine. This is a war for freedom, this is a war that we must win. If we win this war, Putin and every other thug won’t even try this again. So we have to win and win big in this fight for freedom,” she told FOX News.
When it came to the commando-clad Ukrainian president’s repeated demands for U.S. taxpayers to foot the hundred-plus-billion-dollar bill for his defense, Haley said in the same interview, “The part that bothers me is, why is Zelenskyy having to beg for anything?” Two years later, as if on cue, Zelenskyy met today in Davos with over a hundred globalist executives, including Nikki supporters, in his never-ending cash cadge from Western elites.
On the meteorological side, in a GOP presidential debate last August, Haley declared that climate change was “real,” and went further in her confirmation hearing to the UN post, agreeing with Big Climate Democrats that climate change represented a “threat” to national security.
She doubled down in her written remarks to Democrat Senators, declaring, “I do not believe climate change is a hoax.” In response to a question pushing the liberal view that climate change is partly responsible for illegal immigration, Haley took no issue with the claim, declaring instead, “the role that climate change plays in refugee flows is an issue I look forward to assessing.”
Clearly Haley is annoyed that the New Hampshire campaign schedule prevents her from joining her backers in Davos for tomorrow’s “Climate and Nature: Seed Capital Needed” panel moderated in part by carbon-spewing Biden Big Climate czar John Kerry.
Haley shares the view of her globalist elite backers on open borders as well, at least until illegal aliens set foot near their multimillion-dollar mansions on Martha’s Vineyard.
Speaking to yet another elite schmooze festival, the Aspen Ideas Festival, in 2015 while serving as governor of South Carolina, Haley helped the smug moderator gaslight then-candidate Trump – though not by name – on his call for closing the border.
She declined altogether to challenge the moderator’s loaded question, “…[W]hat do you feel about the tone of the immigration debate as it has recently turned?” Instead, Haley said of illegal border-crossers, “We don’t need to talk about them as criminals, they’re not. They’re families that want a better life and they’re desperate to get here.”
No matter how Haley and her media allies try to spin her double-digit loss to President Trump in the Iowa Caucuses as a gamechanger in the GOP primary race, Republican America First voters know Haley’s real record and are not buying what she’s selling.
That said, one thing’s for certain – the Rosé glasses are indeed clinking as Haley’s globalist donors with their Ukraine lapel pins swoop down on final approach in the Swiss Alps this week for their annual sermonizing festival.
Win or lose, Haley stands with them on their core issues and on their overriding mission – to Make Davos Great Again.
Mr. Ullyot is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Deputy Assistant to President Trump.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member