Up until now, I've never been a Nikki Haley-hater.
She did a good job as governor of South Carolina, and as President Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, and she has a reasonably good take on the issues, based on her GOP debate performances. If Trump were one way or another taken out of the presidential race, I've been all ears for her as an alternative.
But now she's jumped the shark.
In an interview with NBC's Kristin Welker, Haley had this to say about a New York jury awarding E. Jean Carroll a mighty $83.3 million for defamation in a secondary trial following an earlier one where a jury found no evidence of her initial claim that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman's dressing room some time around thirty years ago, but did go with a sexual abuse verdict.
WELKER: What is unique about this case is that the jury has now ruled, they have found him liable of sexual abuse. Do you not trust the jury and their findings, ambassador?
HALEY: I absolutely trust the jury and i think that they made their decision based on the evidence, i just don't think that should take him off the ballot, i think the american people will take him off the ballot. I think that's the best way to go forward is not let him play the victim, let him play the loser. That's what we want him to do at the end of the day.
Welker was doing an interesting switcheroo -- the current news is that a jury awarded Carroll an outrageous sum of money for "defamation" from Trump, who not surprisingly probably said something rude about her given that he was put through a trial at the same time several other cases mushroomed to the surface as his presidential campaign began, and insisted he didn't know her. (I wrote about that here). But Welker shape-shifted to the older case of the jury finding Trump guilty of sexual abuse, attempting to pin Haley down as someone who condoned sexual abuse. The initial question was about the jury award, not the earlier trial where the jury found no merit in any rape charge and then went with sexual abuse, which seemed a little questionable, too.
Haley failed to hit Welker for that little trick, almost as if she wasn't aware of what was going on in the case and was happy to be led on. Welker then pressed her again and again about whether Trump should be taken off the ballot, which if the sexual abuse were true, would be a pretty valid reason for keeping someone off the ballot. Trump would have caught that and called her out, but Haley wasn't as sharp and kept repeating the talking point that Trump shouldn't be kept off the ballot.
Haley was clearly commenting on the secondary award for defamation, not sexual abuse, and blathered on about not taking Trump off the ballot, rightly noting that that was third-world tinpot dictatorship stuff.
What wrecked her was her statement of trust in the jury -- an urban jury of solid Trump-hating Democrats with a prosecutor and judge deep in the same leftist camp, presiding of what most voters see as a politicized trial. Does she know these people? Were they really Trump's peers, given their solid-blue orientation? Of course she didn't know them, but hey, everything's on the up and up here, just like our free-and-fair elections where no Democrat would ever dream of cheating.
She's obviously out of touch with what a lot of the voters are seeing. She's obviously not in tune.
And she's mighty lackadaiscal about the problems presented.
Haley did note that later in her remarks that others would come forward with similar lawsuits, dragging Trump's presidency down forever. That doesn't bother her? To the rest of us, that's a problem in the hardware, not the software, a problem of jury consultants and rigging, as AT contributor Patricia McCarthy noted here, making justice unrecognizable, and which is something that might just need addressing. The prospect of endless lawsuits over questionable, long-ago, hazily remembered claims, didn't bother her? It should bother her, because she could be the next one on trial.
The over-sized dollar amount didn't give her pause?
E.Jean Carroll, who is feted wherever she goes, now can't come out in public because of the 'shame' of being insulted by President Trump? Where she lives, that's the opposite of defamation, it's a badge of honor, so it's a little hard to believe that she was defamed.
Haley "absolutely" trusts that jury? Why? Most of us can see something that doesn't look right here, a jury of leftists in a court of leftists, going where no post-presidency has gone before and setting the stage for the Latin Americanization of U.S. politics, where every ex-president needs to flee the country to avoid jailing by his opponents. That kind of crap happens in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, etc.
Her statement of absolute trust when what looks like rigging going on makes her look like a total naif, an idiot, someone who's going to get eaten next by this fourth-world activity.
If she trusts this jury, she can have them. Nobody with a brain outside that loop, though, should trust her.
Image: Screen shot from NBC News video, via YouTube