Nikki Haley has accomplished something no other Republican has managed in the Trump era: She’s departing a high-profile job in better shape politically than when she came in. The 46-year-old U.N. ambassador leaves her post on December 31 with a reputation enhanced and a star on the rise. She has the second-highest approval rating among Trump Cabinet members, behind only James Mattis. Trump Republicans respect her. Anti-Trump Republicans see a savior in her. The mainstream media treat her as an object of fascination rather than an enemy.
In her time in the Cabinet, she’s had no scandals—unlike many other departed Trump officials—nor any public spats with her boss. She’s no lame-duck member of Congress trudging back home after humiliating losses to Trump’s Grand New Party. Nor is she any sort of Trump sycophant, having publicly disagreed with him at times. She asserted in a September op-ed in the Washington Post that when their opinions differ, “I pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person.” Haley has carved out an independent profile while remaining loyal to the president.
The political world is seemingly her oyster, which is why it’s hard to believe her answer about what’s next. “I don’t know,” she tells me. “I have some ideas.” A book, maybe, she says, or a job at a think tank. She’s talking with the casualness of a college kid considering how to spend the summer break. But she quickly resumes the political position. “I think that I will always have a voice when it comes to defending America and when it comes to fighting for our values or fighting for human rights,” she says. “It’s such a part of me, so I will look for an opportunity to do that.”
A young, charismatic former governor, the daughter of immigrants from India, with foreign-policy experience and national name recognition: Many don’t see a mere “voice” in Nikki Haley, they see a future president. Friends tell her she ought to run one day. “I hope she does,” says Trey Gowdy, a retiring congressman from Haley’s state of South Carolina. “She’s very smart, very tough, very politically skilled.” People in the administration who worked with her say similar things.
Talk of a White House run began early for Haley—all the way back in April 2017, after just a few months in Turtle Bay, when a CNN reporter asked if she had presidential designs. “I can’t imagine running for the White House,” she said at the time, but the questions never stopped and picked up considerably this October, when Haley announced she would be resigning from her post. The speculators were not thrown off by the fact that Haley’s announcement came while she was sitting next to President Trump, nor by the fact that she preempted any further questions by outlining her plans for 2020. “I can promise you what I’ll be doing is campaigning for this one,” she gestured toward Trump. “So, I look forward to supporting the president in the next election.”
But the staging of the announcement sent a different message. Haley and Trump were sitting in identical chairs in the Oval Office, something a president usually does with visiting heads of state. And Haley held forth with a quiet confidence that suggested she belonged in the room. One Haley confidant insists there’s no set plan for her political career. “It’s important to realize that she is not a plan-ful person,” he says. “She’s not one of these political operators who always calculates her next move of her career path.”
Haley has decided to remain in New York after leaving the U.N. so that her 17-year-old son can finish high school there. (Her daughter, 20, is a nursing student at Clemson, Haley’s alma mater, and her husband, Michael, remains in South Carolina where he serves as an officer in the National Guard.) Friends of hers also note that a decade in public service during one’s prime earning years can take a financial toll—South Carolina’s governor earns below the national average and a lot less than plenty of public employees in high-tax states—and that Manhattan is a good place to find your footing. The center of the news media universe, it’s also a convenient perch to remain a presence in the national conversation. A book, a think tank role, some TV hits, and a bit of distance from the president she once served? It sure sounds like the beginnings of a campaign for something.
The Haley-for-president talk is also advanced by the success of her tenure at the U.N. At her resignation announcement, President Trump said “she’s done an incredible job” and is a “fantastic person.” Tim Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina and a close friend, says Haley has been “one of the more effective members of the Trump administration and perhaps one of the most consistent members as well.” He points to her admirable willingness to stand up for the United States and for Israel in a body that’s hostile to both: “She’s been clear, she’s been concise, and I think she’s been fierce, at times, which is necessary.”
According to former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Haley played a “central role” in brokering the U.N. sanctions on North Korea. “She has what we call strategic empathy,” he says. “She’s able to take problems from the perspective of others and then frame these problems from their perspective. What she was particularly adept at doing was convincing others why it was in their interest to join us.”
Haley calls her service at the U.N. the “honor of a lifetime.” “I think that the opportunity the president gave me to fight for our values, fight for our country, not let us get disrespected, fight dictators who weren’t taking care of their own people,” she says, “it was an amazing way to serve the country.” She is disdainful of where the United States was at the end of Obama’s tenure. “The previous administration wanted to focus on domestic policy and didn’t want to rock the boat when it came to foreign policy,” she says. “For example, right before I came in, there was a Cuban-sponsored anti-American resolution.” That would be the evergreen condemnation of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, which the General Assembly has considered every year for more than two decades. In the fall of 2016, Barack Obama was at the end of his two-year thawing of relations with Cuba, and when the vote came up, “The United States abstained,” Haley recounts, her disgust growing as she repeats the word. “Abstained. I mean, it blamed America for all of Cuba’s problems, and we just . . . abstained.”
Things would be different on her watch. Demonstrating a gentle but combative style, Haley took strong positions in the Security Council and her comments there quickly became fodder for cable news and Twitter.
In early April, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people in Douma, an act Haley condemned as “a violation of all standards of morality”; she suggested the administration would consider a military response. The Russian ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, began a meeting of the Security Council by criticizing the United States for making threats. Haley’s response went viral. She blasted the Russians for siding with the Syrian dictator: “I started to listen to my Russian friend and respond, but instead, I’m in awe, Vassily, how you say what you say with a straight face.” She went on to note how “strange” it was that Russia was focused on the “unilateral threats” supposedly posed by the United States. “What is strange is that Russia is ignoring the real threat to international peace and security that has brought us all here, and it is ignoring its own unilateral responsibility for all of it,” she said.
Republicans and Trump supporters weren’t the only ones to cheer some tough talk at the United Nations. Mainstream news outlets gave Haley’s speeches plenty of coverage, particularly if they could be interpreted to cut against the president’s stances.
Haley insists that her goals at the U.N. and the president’s were the same. But what’s notable from our interview is how rarely she mentions Trump. As she tells it, she is the active agent—bringing ideas and proposals to the president. “A little over a year ago, I went to the president, and I gave him a binder, and I said ‘I want you to look at this,’ ” she tells me. “And it listed every country, the number of times they voted with us or against us, and how much money in aid we give to them. And he was shocked, furious, but determined to do something about it.” In March, a 53-page confidential memo from Haley’s office outlining this proposal somehow found its way to the press. But Haley’s contribution was only a part of a larger interagency review of foreign aid that Trump had initiated soon after taking office.
And at times, Haley has also gotten ahead of the mercurial president. In April, while appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, she said new sanctions against Russia were coming in response to its continuing support for Assad’s regime in Syria. “Secretary Mnuchin will be announcing those on Monday, if he hasn’t already, and they will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and any chemical weapons use,” Haley said. “I think everyone knows that we sent a strong message and our hope is that they listen to it.”
But Trump scuttled those plans just a few hours later in a meeting with his national security team. There were no new sanctions that Monday, and the White House’s explanation for the confusion was that Haley had misspoken. A day later, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow went further, saying Haley got “ahead of the curve” and that there was “some momentary confusion.” The U.N. ambassador shot back in a statement responding to Kudlow: “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.” He ended up apologizing. What might have been an embarrassing moment turned into an opportunity for Haley to assert her independence in the Trump orbit—and with a feminist undertone that has eluded the other high-profile Republican women in the administration.
Haley has shown a knack for winning these kinds of battles in the media. In September, the New York Times ran a story about the U.N. ambassador’s State Department-funded apartment, and it looked at first like Haley might be another Trump official living large on the taxpayer’s dime. “State Department Spent $52,701 on Curtains for Nikki Haley’s Residence” read the headline, implying Haley had approved the expenditure. She hadn’t; a detail deep in the story revealed that “plans to buy the mechanized curtains were made in 2016, during the Obama administration” and that Haley had “no say in the purchase.” The media piled on the Times, which eventually reworked the story and headline, complete with an editor’s mea culpa note. Another win for the ambassador.
Haley attracts a lot of admiration among Republican-leaning women. Dina Powell, who served as deputy national security adviser for strategy in 2017, begins a conversation about Haley by announcing, “I absolutely love her.” When I bring up her popularity with women at a time when the GOP’s standing with that group of voters couldn’t be much worse, Haley places a hand on her chest, nods and closes her eyes in a gesture of gratitude. “Young girls and women come up and say something, and it’s humbling but I get it,” she tells me. “The reason I get it is because women balance so much and they try so hard to be great at everything, and it’s not so much as they look up to me, but I think they see one of them doing it, too.” Haley says that women seek out “camaraderie” with other women, and can see her as a kindred spirit: “We’re doing the best we can and we know that there is someone out there looking at us as we do it, and we don’t want to disappoint.”
If Haley is a feminist, she’s unquestionably a conservative one. “I don’t think women have more challenges. They don’t. I’ve never thought that. I think our challenges can be different, but I don’t think we have more challenges,” she says. “The frustrations, I think, are literally what every other woman goes through. Balancing your marriage and your kids and your finances and your work and wanting to really make people proud. Making sure your parents are okay. Loving the job you do and wanting to be great at it.”
We are meeting the day before the funeral for George H.W. Bush, and I ask Haley about the former president, who himself had a stint as U.N. ambassador. As she talks about Bush, her eyes brighten and a smile emerges. “Did you ever read the Jon Meacham book?” she asks, referring to a 2015 biography of the 41st president. “It was amazing. He just got into positions that he really didn’t want or wasn’t supposed to get. But then it’s just fascinating to see how doors opened and how it played out.” It played out pretty well for Bush who, a decade after accepting the U.N. job, found himself in the vice presidency and on the way to taking up the mantle of commander in chief himself. “You want to talk about a lifetime of service,” Haley says. “It’s really a remarkable career.” I ask her if she thinks she could have a legacy like his. She demurs. “I’m most proud of being able to serve my country,” she says. “It’s really been just the coolest opportunity.”
