US President Donald Trump meets with Nikki Haley, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Oval office of the White House on October 9, 2018 in Washington, DC. Olivier Douliery | AFP | Getty Images

Thanks to a mix of conventional and unconventional moves made possible by the Trump era, Nikki Haley has made herself an early front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Haley's most risky and unconventional move materialized this week as her new book "With all Due Respect" included her account of how then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then-White House chief of staff John Kelly tried to recruit her in a secretive effort to undermine President Donald Trump's agenda. In a subsequent interview about the book, Haley made the argument that resisting the president publicly and to his face is fine, but doing so behind his back is not. (Tillerson has since denied Haley's account of the story.) Regardless of who is telling the truth, Haley's position perfectly straddles a difficult set of prerequisites that are emerging for any ambitious Republican today. It's also much more newsworthy right now as more Trump supporters are responding to the impeachment process by clearly embracing the growing narrative that career bureaucrats inside the White House have been trying to catch the president in some form of misconduct from day one.

This is the perfect way and perfect time for Haley to clearly set herself apart from the small group of "Never Trumpers" that remain in the GOP. While that group seems to be overrepresented among the career political class types in Washington, D.C., support for the president remains at or above the 85% level among all Republican primary voters with little evidence that any anti-Trump candidate now or in the future will get any traction within the GOP ranks. Second, do we really need polls to tell us President Trump remains enormously popular among the Republican rank and file? The president is still filling large arenas at his rallies. He was greeted with overwhelming cheers in the deep red state of Alabama at the Alabama-LSU football game on Saturday. And even some of the pundits who had been mostly critical of Trump until fairly recently, like former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and NBC contributor Hugh Hewitt have begun an almost daily defense of the president in their Twitter feeds. Anti-Trump Republicans may believe they have principles of their side, but the one thing they don't seem to have on their side is many other Republicans.

Haley's defense of Trump on one hand and public exasperation over some of his behavior on the other hand seems to fit nicely with the attitude of millions of voters who continue to back the president's policies but are still a little queasy about his personal conduct.