NIKKI HALEY WILL NEVER BE PRESIDENT, PART LXXVII

Nikki Haley, a woman many smart people believe will be a top 2024 Republican presidential contender -- once Republican voters have gotten all that Trump silliness out of their system -- went on Ben Shapiro's podcast this past Sunday and said things about immigration that seem perfectly compatible with GOP orthodoxy:

But we're a country of laws, and the second you give up being a country of laws, you've lost everything this country was founded on. And so if you don't like something that's happening, fix it. We can't have a hundred thousand people last month on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then sit there and say, "Do we let 'em go? Do we not let 'em go? Where do we kee--" I mean, it's a debate that really needs to stop.

The problem is what she said prior to that, which has been isolated and taken out of context by Breitbart:

NIKKI HALEY: IMMIGRATION 'MAKES US GREAT'

Immigrants — not the 280 million native-born Americans — make America great, says Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the U.N.

“Immigrants are the fabric of America,” the former governor of South Carolina said on the May 5 Ben Shapiro podcast, effectively dismissing Americans and their children. She continued:

It’s what makes us great. We need as many immigrants as we can. We need the skills, we need the talent, we need the culture. We need all of that.

Haley did not try to explain why roughly 215 million adult Americans and their 65 million children need legal immigrants or temporary migrants, including the roughly 500,000 Indian visa workers who have taken white-collar jobs from Americans, often after getting workplace training from the Americans they replaced.

The Breitbart story goes on to quote a Trump tweet:

A nation WITHOUT BORDERS is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters. Jeb just doesn’t get it.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2015

Haley says precisely this, but the Breitbart story doesn't quote her saying it or acknowledge that she said it.

The story continues:

A growing number of Americans are rejecting the “Nation of Immigrants” narrative.

You know who isn't rejecting it, at least some of the time? Donald Trump, who said something Haleyesque in his 2019 State of the Union address: “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” That doesn't show up in the Breitbart story, of course.

The story adds, for no good reason:

Haley is the U.S.-born daughter of two immigrants from India, whose ancient culture enforces a stratification of people into castes inescapably assigned at birth.

This is what's going to happen to every Republican who attempts a "return to normalcy" run for the White House in 2024. And it will work, because Republican voters show no signs of rejecting extremism. (Note the wave of extreme abortion laws in red states, all promoted with no reference to Trump. No Republican in Georgia, Alabama, or Ohio believes that passing these laws is a politically risky move; no one thinks Republican voters will rediscover an innate sense of right-centrism and punish the politicians who support these laws at the polls.)

Haley might have a shot in 2024 if she makes a Lindsey Graham-style move to the extreme right on every issue on which she's only moderately conservative. But she won't do that because she'll be lulled by centrist pundits claiming that the GOP is ready for change.

It won't be. She doesn't stand a chance.