During a speech in South Carolina late last month, Haley trotted out a rather interesting line of attack against Trump: “And the truth of it all — and this is another hard truth — I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time. I was proud to serve America in his administration, and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. You know I’m right. Chaos follows him. We have too much division in this country and too many threats around the world to be sitting in chaos once again.”
These were not tossed-off remarks. Byron York, the only political reporter who seems to have grasped the significance of the remark, notes that Haley has been road-testing some variation of the “chaos” line since October, and it appears it’s a regular part of her stump speech. York has done a typically thorough and thoughtful analysis of this, including why Haley’s line might ruffle some feathers among Republicans.
Now, certainly, there are many Republicans out there who might be inclined to agree with a facile reading of this line. There’s hardly a Trump voter out there who hasn’t at least privately lamented Trump saying inflammatory things that detract from his actual policy accomplishments.
But ultimately, Haley’s line about “chaos” spectacularly misreads the problem and, along with it, the sentiment of a lot of Trump voters she needs to win over. When she says “the truth is, rightly or
