In an opening gambit for the 2024 Presidential Race, former U.N. Ambassador and S.C. Governor Nikki Haley has done a double-back flip flop and dumped President Donald Trump. Gymnast Simone Biles is jealous of this new move, but gymnastics is not new to Mrs. Haley.

Open Twitter this morning (Don’t judge me.), and you will find that “Nimrata” is trending. Nimrata Randhawa is the birth name of Nikki Haley. The subterranean denizens of the Twitterverse are using her birth name to smear Nikki Haley. Don’t ask why. We know that, in their dark, bitter hearts, the keyboard warriors of the Left are ugly racists. The Twitterati also believe that by reminding Trumpers that Haley is Indian, we will be turned off. Oops, we are turned off by her political gymnastics, not her ethnicity.

As Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley was very flexible. She didn’t support the execrable Common Core education program, until she did. There was also her Confederate Stars and Bars flag back flip. Haley has had more positions on her relationship with Donald Trump than in a whole gymnastics competition.

The Victory Girls have written favorably on Nikki Haley and been disappointed in her also. It’s all because of her political gymnastics.

Which leads to “Nimrata” trending today:

Nimrata been trash. I tried to warn people.

— RAM (Richard Armande Mills) (@RAMRANTS) February 12, 2021

Haley has given over six hours of interview time to Tim Alberta of Politico. The result is an utterly scathing article, “Nikki Haley’s Time For Choosing”. Alberta writes:

Walking out of the White House in the fall of 2018, Haley thought the worst was behind her.

No more briefings on presidential tweets. No more knife-fighting with administration officials. No more worrying that Trump would torpedo her career. Settling back into her beloved South Carolina after a 22-month stint in New York, equipped with a big boat and a luxury home and $200,000 speaking gigs galore, Haley counted her winnings. Joining the Trump administration had been a massive gamble, and she hit the jackpot—not merely emerging unscathed from a gauntlet that maimed many of her contemporaries, but looking all the smarter and sturdier for it. She had gained rare foreign policy experience, nailed the role of adult in the room and raised her visibility in front of donors and voters alike. Her political future wasn’t just intact; it was brighter than ever before.

I may not care for Haley, but mentioning her “big boat and a luxury home” makes Alberta sound like a jealous middle-school girl. Whatever one thinks of Haley, she has earned her home and boat. There is no evidence that she did dirty deals with China or the Ukraine to earn her boodle. And as for $200k speaking fees, isn’t that what Janet Yellen did, too. Spare us the hypocrisy.

And then there is this:

Since last fall, I’ve spent nearly six hours talking with Haley on-the-record. I’ve also spoken with nearly 70 people who know her: friends, associates, donors, staffers, former colleagues. From those conversations, two things are clear. First, Nikki Haley is going to run for president in 2024. Second, she doesn’t know which Nikki Haley will be on the ballot. Will it be the Haley who has proven so adaptive and so canny that she might accommodate herself to the dark realities of a Trump-dominated party? Will it be the Haley who is combative and confrontational and had a history of giving no quarter to xenophobes? Or will it be the Haley who refuses to choose between these characters, believing she can be everything to everyone?

Well, it doesn’t matter which Nikki shows up. She may well get the donor class. She won’t get the 74 million Trump voters to show up. We will remember. We may forgive, but we won’t forget.

Morning Joe and Mika weighed in:

Yes, Joe Scarborough called Senators who supported Donald Trump the “cop killer caucus”. Yes, he is referring to Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick. The mainstream media is still claiming that he was hit with a fire extinguisher even though that has long been debunked. Joe and Mika don’t care about the truth.

The money quote from both the video and the Politico article is this:

“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.”

This was the most certainty I’d heard from any Republican in the aftermath of January 6. And Haley wasn’t done.

“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” she said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Nikki or Nimrata, whoever shows up should know that we won’t show up for her. Read the whole Politico article. It is damning. We won’t forget. She can take her political gymnastics elsewhere.

Featured Image: US Embassy Guatemala/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)