We’re so caught up by Nikki Haley sticking her finger in Donald Trump’s eye that we’re losing sight of the big picture. We’re so caught up by Nikki Haley declaring she’s not afraid of Trump’s “retribution” that we’re losing sight of the big picture.
What is the big picture? Trump is a man. And, by far his most durable and formidable challenger for the Republican nomination for president has turned out not another man – not Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, or Vivek Ramaswamy – but a woman!
When Hillary Clinton ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign the fact that she was a woman in a man’s world – presidential politics – was a large if not dominant part of the story. Clinton herself wrote with pain and anger – especially in her subsequent book, What Happened – about the discrimination she faced for being female. She felt obliged to spend “what added up to a month of time on the 2016 campaign trail having her hair and makeup done; if she showed up without having those things done, she got slammed. She even hired a linguistics expert so could learn to rev up a crowd by shouting while not sounding too high pitched.”*
Eight years later the female angle has disappeared from coverage of the campaign nearly entirely. It seems part of our past, not our present. For this sea change credit where credit is due: Haley herself has contributed significantly to what has been not a revolution but an evolution.
Haley looks entirely feminine without being cloying or too girlie-girlie. She sounds tough but not intimidating. She has come to attack Trump in a way that she did not earlier in her campaign – but she might have benefited from her gradualist approach. Had she taken him on too strongly and stridently at the outset she could easily have been seen as too assertive, too aggressive. Instead, she is relaxing into her role. She now appears both likable and competent, impressive but not so formidable as to be off-putting.
Whatever Nikki Haley accomplishes in 2024 she is positioning herself for the future. She is also playing a pivotal role in advancing women in leadership at the highest level of American politics.
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*Time, September 14, 2017.