The Haleyites were giddy: dancing, downing glasses of white wine, sashaying in sassy dresses, performatively smooching a Nikki Haley bobblehead doll for selfies. It was the Saturday night of the South Carolina primary, 10 days before Super Tuesday, but a distinct trace of let-’er-rip fatalism was already in the air as election returns trickled in over CNN on a jumbo screen.
In the raucous crowd at the event for “Women for Nikki,” a core group of Haley supporters and advisers, Bhavna Vasudeva, a 56-year-old Indian American broker who has known Haley for 30 years, paused from dancing to “Radio Ga Ga” to tell the story of her appearance on Fox News the day before. After advocating for Haley, she stepped off the air to find her phone blowing up with texts from MAGA die-hards. “They were calling me every kind of four-letter word,” she said.
I looked at the texts.
“What a f*cking c*nt!!!” declared Michael from Idaho.
“I hope you don’t wake up tomorrow,” Mike from Maryland told her.
Bryan from Orange County, California: “Bitch shut your f*cking mouth.”
If these kinds of attacks were predictable—especially after Trump declared that anyone who donated to Haley’s campaign would be “barred, permanently,” from MAGA-land—they underscored the conundrum of being Nikki Haley. In the last throes of her run, under continual pressure to cede the nomination, she had morphed into a self-styled Joan of Arc of the GOP. As her campaign sank, she fired off Taylor Swift–flavored texts and emails celebrating little girls who had given Haley friendship bracelets, which the candidate began wearing on the trail, and invoking “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister of Britain. “We are blessed to live in a country where our girls can grow up and do anything they want to do,” Haley said.
If the likeness to Hillary Clinton and her 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling wasn’t clear enough, Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, told me Haley was now “iconic,” a “historic” figure. “Nikki Haley is the single most successful female Republican politician in history, period,” she told me during a rally in Massachusetts. “That cannot be denied.”
Read the full story at Vanity Fair.
