By Brigitte L. Nacos
Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, UN Ambassador during part of the Trump presidency, and now declared candidate for the GOP’s presidential nomination, runs as member of “a new generation to lead us into the future.” In the early stages of her candidacy, she appealed particularly for the support of female Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere. Yet, if anyone hoped that a woman as alternative to candidate Trump and potential male competitors would take a softer approach to her party’s outrage politics, she already dashed those hopes. For once, Trump may be right in calling her “overly ambitious.”
Like her onetime boss and now fellow-candidate, she wants to please the core of extremist Republican primary voters, many of them part of America’s deadly gun culture. In the midst of a mass shooting crisis in this country and nearly daily incidents in which children and adults are killed in public places and their own homes, Haley tweeted a photo showing her with an attack weapon with her finger on the trigger and the caption, “Making sure our military has the equipment they need to keep us safe is a priority…” Under the guise of supporting the
military candidate Haley promoted the very attack guns that can be bought and carried in most blue states. She also thanked the manufacturer of the gun she held and a gun-rights organization. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire shortly after the mass shooting in a school of Nashville, Tennessee, Haley rejected any gun-control measures. Instead, she assured fellow-Republicans, “Everybody wants to talk about gun control. My thing is, I don't want to take away your ability to protect yourself until they do those things that protect those kids." She said it is okay to have metal detectors in schools.
To emphasize the generational gap between herself (she is 51 years old) and the two heavy weights for 2024, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Haley called for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians 75-years old. But although Trump will be 77-years old in June, Haley exempts the former president from her “old age” campaign attacks on Joe Biden, who is four years older than Trump and will be 81-years old in November.
Many voters, Democrats and Republicans, are uncomfortable with the advanced age of both Biden and Trump along with the old guard in the Congress. Thus, it is quite legitimate to discuss the age of candidates for the highest offices in the land.
The question is, how to frame such discussions. And Haley has not come up with right answer. Instead, her public statement that it is unlikely for the Biden to live until he is 86 years old and that therefore a vote for Biden in 2024 will be a vote for Kamala Harris is as shameful as her mandatory pro-gun photo on Twitter.
But as the great Irish writer Finton O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Books on Trump’s current legal problems and by extension the political culture the former president created, “the shameless cannot be shamed.”
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