TRUMP-HALEY 2020? NOT GOING TO HAPPEN, OBVIOUSLY.

Andrew Stein, the allegedly-still-Democratic former Manhattan borough president and onetime Ann Coulter main squeeze who's also a convicted tax evader, has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today arguing that President Trump should dump his running mate.

I’m proud to have founded the Democrats for Trump movement in 2016. President Trump’s pro-growth policies have revived the stagnating U.S. economy, and he deserves a second term. But to have the best chance of re-election, he should replace Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley.

... [Pence has] given Mr. Trump all the help he can. He inspired his fellow evangelical Christians to take a chance in 2016. But in 2020 they’ll already be repelled by the Democrats’ embrace of infanticide. Mr. Trump’s greater obstacle to re-election comes from politically moderate suburban women, many of whom see him as divisive.

... Nikki Haley on the ticket could tamp down the antipathy for Mr. Trump that seems to afflict so many moderate and Republican-leaning women. President Trump needs the prospect of a Vice President Haley to help recapture the White House.

This would probably work -- the mainstream media isn't wild about Pence, but it seems likely to embrace Haley. (Here's the ed board of The New York Times telling us, at the time of her resignation as UN ambassador, that "Nikki Haley Will Be Missed"; here's a Haley puff piece in Vogue.)

But it won't happen, and not just because presidents don't dump their vice presidents anymore. (The last to do it was Gerald Ford, whose VP was Nelson Rockefeller but who ran in 1976 with Bob Dole. The last to dump a VP who'd previously been on the ticket was FDR, who did it twice.) It's clear that Trump doesn't respect norms and has no problems with personnel chaos; he'd dump Pence if he wanted to.

But he doesn't want to. For all that he's done to please right-wing evangelicals, Trump clearly feels insecure about their support. Even though they'd pick him over any other candidate because the Democrat will be pro-choice and pro-LGBT, he still thinks he's vulnerable. And why would he want Pence gone? Pence couldn't be more servile.

And Haley, although she calls herself a Methodist now, was raised Sikh by her Indian-born parents. (She was born in South Carolina.) This doesn't always go over well.

Yes, raised Sikh by my parents and very proud of it.

— Archive: Ambassador Nikki Haley (@AmbNikkiHaley) May 20, 2018

She's also been chastised by Breitbart for saying nice things about immigrants:

“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.

Trump also says nice things about legal immigrants sometimes, but he's white and of Northern European extraction. Haley isn't. She'd win moderate voters, but alienate Trump's base, especially the overt racists. She might be a net plus for him, but he'd never make the move.