On Wednesday's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski urged Nikki Haley to "hang in there"—to stay in the race for the Republican presidential nomination till the very end.
Mika's reasoning: stay in with the hope of setting up "an American race" with an "American candidate"—instead of "Russian idiot" Trump. We need "a real race for the presidency. An American race. "
Nobody expects a "fact checker" to point out to Mika that Trump was born in America, and her outburst sounds daft, like calling Obama a "Kenyan idiot." Is Mika the birther now?
Based on Joe Scarborough's predilection for citing his Baptist upbringing, Mika praised Haley as someone who's "come around." On more than one occasion, Joe's mentioned that Baptists will accept people, regardless of their past, who eventually "see the light."
MIKA: Nikki Haley has come around. She's a good candidate. She's great on stage. And she's saying what needs to be said about Donald Trump. And every day she says a little more.
And I hope she stays in this race. I hope she hangs in there no matter what happens in South Carolina. Republican voters need a viable option. An American candidate. Not a Russian idiot! That's what they've got in Donald Trump.
Mika's plea to Haley came after John Heilemann, on the campaign trail in South Carolina, which holds its primary on Saturday, said that Haley is able stay in the race because she has a core of donors that wants her to remain. Their notion/hope is that something could "befall" Trump -- particularly in terms of his legal situation -- that could create an opening for Haley.
That's a fairly standard notion—it was DeSantis' presumed strategy. But Heilemann then suggested something more surprising--that Haley might be positioning herself for a third-party run with a group such as No Labels.
The acid test of Haley's determination to stay in the race could come very soon. As Heilemann suggested, given the number of upcoming winner-take-all primaries, Trump could reach his "magic number" for clinching the nomination within just a few weeks.
At that point, the news coverage of Haley is likely to fade -- along with donor enthusiasm. It's one thing to be seen as resolute. It's another to become an object of pity or ridicule—cue the Monty Python "Black Knight" clip!
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
2/21/24
6:38 am ETJOHN HEILEMANN: Like I said a second ago, Willie, it was kind of striking. She really went further yesterday and said -- seemed to suggest that she was going to stay in this race all the way until the very end.
And, and I think there is something in that, in the sense that she is, we know, that candidates don't drop out because they're losing. They drop out because they run out of money. That's the truism of presidential, and all other politics.
And I think Nikki Haley has discovered, so far at least, that there is a core of donors that wants to have her in this race. Even if she gets beat. Now, who knows how long this will last, but so far there's a core of donors who look at Donald Trump's future--what's going to happen to him potentially in these court cases going forward, other possible things that might unfold in this very unpredictable climate, and say, hey, you know what? It'd be good to have Nikki Haley still in this race, still in fighting.
In a lot of these states she's not going to even win any delegates. They're winner-take-all states. So Trump is going to get himself to his magic number of delegates probably, they think, by the second or third week of March! But she is now suggesting she wants to kind of stick around. And I think that part of the thinking is that something, it's not totally crazy, wishful thinking, that something could befall Donald Trump, particularly on the legal front, that might change the state of the race, that might create an opening for her.
And I'll say one other thing! Is that, we play, rightly, we play the clips of Haley going head on against Donald Trump. She's amped up her, the directness and the fierceness of her critiques against him. But she does, she hits Joe Biden just as hard as she does Donald Trump in these same speeches. She did that yesterday.
And there is a part of her that seems to be saying hey -- she said this directly yesterday -- 75% of the country doesn't want this race. And she makes a very -- she makes a case. She made a case yesterday that if you were listening to it in the abstract you would say hey, this woman sounds like a third-party candidate. This woman sounds like an independent candidate who's trying to get ready, potentially, to put herself in a position where she might be someone that someone like No Labels might decide to look at down the line.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: So, you know, I've definitely learned along the way, talking about politics especially with you [Joe Scarborough] over the course of the decade, that you will take someone when they decide to come around, whenever they decide to come around.
And Nikki Haley has come around. She's a good candidate. She's great on stage. And she's saying what needs to be said about Donald Trump. And every day she says a little more.
And I hope she stays in this race. I hope she hangs in there no matter what happens in South Carolina. Republican voters need a viable option. An American candidate. Not a Russian idiot! That's what they've got in Donald Trump.
They need someone like Nikki Haley to hang in there, to give them an option that they could actually support. And a real race for the presidency. An American race.
