And he’s not going to entertain anyone who is planning to run for president in 2024. Politico Playbook reports:
NIKKI HALEY reached out to former President DONALD TRUMP on Wednesday to request a sit-down at Mar-a-Lago, but a source familiar tells Playbook that he turned her down. The two haven’t spoken since the insurrection on Jan. 6, when Haley blasted Trump for inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol.
The snub comes on the heels of Tim Alberta’s deep dive in POLITICO Magazine last week on Haley’s presidential ambitions and how she’s trying to have it both ways with Trump.
Channeling George Costanza in mid-December, Haley refused to confront Trump over his election lies because he believed they were true. “I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told Alberta. “This is not him making it up.”
After Jan. 6, Haley changed her tune.
“I think he’s going to find himself further and further isolated,” Haley said of the defeated president. “I think his business is suffering at this point. I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. I think he’s lost his social media, which meant the world to him. I mean, I think he’s lost the things that really could have kept him moving.”
And: “I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”
Haley tried to recover Thursday with a damage-control op-ed in the WSJ wrapped in blame-the-media rhetoric. But Trump, apparently, isn’t having it.
Why in the world would she think he would be amenable to giving her a Dear Leader visitation after that?
The only person who has been able to finesse the Trump bootlicking with some vague public criticism is Lindsey Graham. I don’t think Trump feel that Graham is any threat to him. He knows that Haley is.
Republicans are going to have to pick a side. Cheney, Sasse and some of the Governors who have presidential ambitions are betting that Trump will have imploded by then and having been a stand-up guy and facing him down is a selling point. Most of the others are assuming that the Trump cult will still be running the GOP and they need to be on the right side of him, even if he doesn’t run. Haley is trying to have it both ways and that just will not work anymore. The cult demands total loyalty.