Opinion: Nikki Haley knows what the Republican base wants. By Paul Waldman

Opinion: Nikki Haley knows what the Republican base wants. By Paul Waldman

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Nikki Haley speaks at the Republican National Convention in August 2020. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

How will the Republican Party create its post-Trump future, and how will Republicans trying to serve their own ambitions navigate it?

These questions have been widely debated, and an answer is already emerging: If you have hopes of running for president in 2024, you have to embrace the all-encompassing culture war, even if your embrace of former president Donald Trump himself is less than total.

Consider Nikki Haley, who recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that internal Republican battles over Trump’s legacy are being blown out of proportion by a liberal media engaged in “a calculated strategy to pit conservatives against one another.”

Translation: If you’re uncertain about Haley’s occasional gentle criticisms of Trump, be assured: She still hates many of the people you hate, starting with the media. And that’s the key.

Haley is walking a tightrope, but it’s what she’s done her entire career. Granting that we never know how a candidate will emerge from the crucible of the presidential primary campaign until they go through it, she looks like a strong contender to be the champion of the non-crazy Republican Party. She’s extremely conservative, but has her moments of thoughtfulness. As a woman and the daughter of immigrants from India, she can be living proof that the GOP is more than just the party of angry White men.

And she rode the wave of Trumpism that took over her party with unusual skill. She criticized Trump pretty emphatically during the 2016 primaries, then became his U.N. ambassador. The job, it turned out, was perfect: It gave her foreign policy credentials while leaving her 200 miles from Washington, excusing her from having to defend Trump in most of the relentless and vulgar controversies of his presidency. Unlike most of those in his employ, she managed to serve her time and then depart without succumbing to scandal or seeing him attack her on her way out.

So now she can say that Trump was a terrific president on policy but distance herself from the post-election debacle that led to his second impeachment. And she can lament the way the country is divided while blaming the right’s favorite scapegoat, the media. As she put it:

Is that really what the anti-Trump media wants? Maybe. Hatred and polarization draw attention, ratings and clicks. But what’s good for them is bad for America.

The argument that members of the media are driven by clicks and drawn to conflict is perfectly legitimate. But when you put it in the context of “the anti-Trump media” being just out “to pit conservatives against one another,” it sounds more like a message to the base: You hate these people, and so do I.

And that’s what every Republican knows they’ll have to do in one form or another. In a party where policy has become an afterthought, the culture war separating us from them is the context of any discussion.

We just saw how blackouts in Texas — where every statewide elected official is a Republican — somehow got blamed on hippie liberals and their dastardly Green New Deal. Nobody is going to get the 2024 GOP nomination because they have the cleverest proposal for tax reform. It’s utterly impossible to imagine the candidates having the kind of months-long debate the Democratic candidates did in 2020 over their visions for health care.

And though the candidates will each bring their own style and their own relationship to Trump, they all know that the culture war is the price of admission to the race. Even if they aren’t so inclined (which most of them are), they’ll have no choice but to tell primary voters that they share their resentments — and that liberals are coming to destroy everything they hold dear.

Yet what makes it a real challenge is that what they need to win the nomination is very different from what they’ll need to win the general election. It’s a problem every party nominee faces, but in 2024 it could be particularly acute, given the shadow of Trump.

Because Haley is a shrewd politician, she already understands the tricky double-axel she and the other potential candidates will have to execute: In the primaries they’ll need to demonstrate their affection for Trump in a party still dominated by his loyalists, but in the general election the Republican nominee will have to distance from him because he’s loathed by a majority of the broader electorate.

It’s a dynamic we haven’t really seen before, since parties usually cast off the person who lost the last election. Democrats didn’t have to demonstrate their loyalty to Hillary Clinton in 2020 in order to win over their base, any more than Republicans had to show in 2016 that they were still faithful to Mitt Romney.

Even if Trump himself continues to fade, the thirst for culture-war rabble-rousing will remain. And there’s a good chance that Republican voters will nominate the candidate who can engage in that performative outrage-mongering — against the media, the blue states, the Democrats and liberals in general — most convincingly.

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