Let us sing the tale of two Republicans, both of whom have had their political lives and futures capsized in the wake of the elevation of a vulgar talking yam to the most powerful elected office on Earth. First, Congressman Peter Wolfe Tone Owen Roe Cathleen ni Houlihan King, Republican of New York, has decided to spend more time with his family, perhaps because, when he was reelected in 2018, a surprisingly large number of his constituents decided that he should spend more time with his family, too. King is now the 20th Republican House incumbent to announce that they’d rather not face the voters again. (Three GOP incumbents have already blown town entirely.)

King is 75 and has served 14 terms, so it’s plausible that his explanation for his departure is true, but it does seem that an awful lot of congressional Republicans either don’t like being in the minority very much and/or don’t feel like running with the current president* at the top of the ticket. Most of the valedictories for King call him a moderate, but his career made a late turn into raw Islamophobia, which made more than a few people wonder why someone who’d been such an open supporter of the IRA during the Troubles suddenly was getting fussy about political violence when it landed on his own doorstep. I guess he is a “moderate” if measured on the modern Gohmert-Gaetz Scale, but in a era of sensible Republicanism, he’d be on the right or, at least, on the eccentric wing of the party.

And then there’s former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, truly one of the most stunningly ambitious political creatures of my long experience. Haley is shilling a book now, and one of its most prominent anecdotes has Haley heroically turning down an appeal from Rex Tillerson and John Kelly, then the Secretary of State and the White House chief of staff, respectively, to help “save the country” by undermining El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago’s administration*. From CBS News:

Haley recounts a closed-door encounter with then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: "Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren't being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country … Tillerson went on to tell me the reason he resisted the president's decisions was because, if he didn't, people would die. This was how high the stakes were, he and Kelly told me. We are doing the best we can do to save the country, they said. We need you to work with us and help us do it. This went on for over an hour.”...

"It absolutely happened," said Haley. "And instead of saying that to me, they should've been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan. It should've been, 'Go tell the president what your differences are, and quit if you don't like what he's doing.' But to undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing. And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive.”

This is quite a tale and Haley tells it well. She gets it out there that some of the alleged “grown-ups in the room” were scared bloodless by the current president*, and, at the same time, she gets to be the heroine of her own account by hearing Tillerson and Kelly out and then turning them down. She also brags about being part of the president*’s decision to take her advice on cutting all aid to Palestinians on the West Bank, a decision that has had calamitous human-rights consequences there. Nikki Haley, then, is a Trump loyalist until it becomes inconvenient to be, and she has almost enough room under her bus as the president* has under his. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the 2024 Republican primary campaign.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io