Don’t look now, but a seasonal apparition has appeared among us, dragging its chains as it comes and hoping to put the fear of Republicanism past into Donald Trump and his MAGA cultural warriors. It’s business Republicanism, late to the Christmas festivities but a ghostly reminder of what the GOP was not long ago and what it could be again, if its big-money backers have their way in the upcoming party caucuses and primaries.
Republicanism past is presently taking the human form of former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. She’s talking a good game (just don’t check the record), yet the object of her negative attentions, Donald Trump, the Ebenezer Scrooge of this morality play, is in his nightcap and snoozing away undisturbed — for the moment at least.
Whatever else you might say about Trump, he’s not corporate America’s favorite GOP candidate. It liked his tax cuts and deregulation, but not his attacks on free trade and his class-based rhetoric. It’s actually hard to know what Trump’s economic philosophy is, or if he really has one at all.
To use the current buzzword, Trump’s approach to most issues is “transactional,” the moment-to-moment formulation of government policy on the fly through deal-making and interpersonal relationships, or simply through remembered grudges, personal prejudices, or flights of fancy. He’s no ideological conservative, but rather a reactive politician with authoritarian instincts and an unerring feel for what’s bothering people.
This is not what corporate America wants; it wants certainty, predictability and dependability, so that it can carry on profit making as usual with minimal interference and disruption, pleasing its stockholders, increasing market share, and arranging its investment plans more easily. It also wants traditional economic conservatism as an operating premise, such as existed under Reagan and the Bushes. That’s what Nikki Haley promises. Hers is coherent anti-government laissez-faire of the sort beloved by Wall Street.
Business interests have lately done pretty well under Joe Biden. For the most part, he’s handed over management of the economy to a conservative Federal Reserve chaired by a Republican appointee, Jerome Powell, whom he earlier reappointed. Biden’s kept business taxes low, declining to roll back the 2017 Trump tax cut. He’s allowed fossil-fuel development to proceed unabated and has not crusaded against economic inequality or market-based healthcare, as a Bernie Sanders might have done. He’s also pledged rhetorical allegiance to capitalism and resisted any temptation to lambaste “economic royalists” in the FDR style.
Still and all, Biden is a Democrat who says he likes unions, and he has a left-leaning progressive wing to answer to, so business conservatives, uncomfortable with Trump as they are, don’t fully trust him.
Enter Nikki Haley, the girl of their dreams, politically speaking. Born Nimarata Randhawa, she’s the daughter of Indian Sikh immigrants, who arrived in South Carolina, cradle of the Confederacy, by way of Canada. Haley’s parents were the kind of prosperous immigrants Republicans like, starting a business and sending their daughter to archly conservative Clemson University, where she studied finance and accounting in preparation for a business career.
By the 2000s, Haley had married, changed her name, converted to Christianity, and entered politics as a standard pro-life, anti-tax Republican. Aside from her much-ballyhooed removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol following the 2015 Charleston church shooting, Haley’s tenure as governor (2011-17) was marked by an anti-union, pro-business, budget-cutting agenda, featuring state subsidies to attract corporate development. Boeing received $120 million on her watch for its facility near Charleston and later rewarded Haley (post-governorship) with a seat on its board of directors, at $300,000 a year, a likely reward for her efforts to prevent unionization of the new facility.
Haley’s next position was as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations (2017-18), an appointment distinguished by her aggressive advocacy on behalf of Israel and loyal overall support for the Donald’s bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy. She departed early from the Trump team, resigning before accusations of ethics violations related to her acceptance of private luxury plane trips from businessmen could be fully investigated — perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not. On the way out the door, Haley hailed Trump’s domestic record and called him a friend (she would later call him a producer of “chaos”), then set out to enrich herself in the private sector, with an eye toward 2024.
Within three years, Haley had parlayed her political prominence (via paid speeches, consulting contracts, and service on corporate boards) into a net worth of $8 million, up from $1 million. In the process, untainted by the MAGA insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, she had drawn the serious attention of an establishment Republican donor class in search of a plausible economically conservative candidate for the White House.
The names on the Haley corporate contributor list under her super PAC, SFA Fund Inc., comprise a who’s who of politically active Republican CEOs and investors. Their ranks have been supplemented recently by Koch Industries’ Americans for Prosperity, which has endorsed Haley’s candidacy and pledged additional millions.
What’s most striking perhaps is the presence on the contributor list of billionaire Democratic donors, led by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank. Dimon has urged fellow corporate Democrats to get behind Haley as this year’s fail-safe anti-Trump candidate. When last heard from, he was successfully pushing financial deregulation from inside the Democratic Party, which says a lot about the current state of the Democrats, none of it flattering.
So what do the corporate moneymen see that they like in Haley that they don’t see in Trump, DeSantis or even Biden? Howard Gleckman of the Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center spelled it out in a Nov. 6, 2023 release.
Corporate America’s sweetheart would do the following: (1) further cut income-tax rates; (2) make Trump’s 20% tax deduction for “pass through” businesses permanent; (3) balance the federal budget; (4) cap all federal spending as a share of the economy; (5) require annual budgetary reauthorization for all federal programs; (6) veto any spending above 2019 levels; (7) raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare; (8) turn traditional public Medicare into privatized Medicare Advantage.
There’s more, but you get the idea. In a word, Nikki Haley favors good, old-fashioned austerity — except, of course, for corporate America.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2024
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