HALEY WON'T WIN PRIMARY VOTES BY ATTACKING TRUMP ON NORTH KOREA, EVEN IF HE DESERVES IT

This should be a way for Nikki Haley to discredit Donald Trump, but it won't work:

When Nikki Haley opens her presidential campaign on Wednesday she will be joined by Cindy Warmbier, whose son died days after he was released from North Korean prison in 2017....

Warmbier credits Haley with giving her the strength to continue fighting against the North Korean regime after the death of her 22-year-old son, Otto....

Warmbier had admired Haley’s determination when it came to North Korea sanctions and asked for the meeting when she was in Washington, DC, for then-President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.

“It took someone like Nikki Haley to light the fire under me,” Warmbier said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “She took me out of that survival mode and put me in a fighter mode.”

This is clearly meant to draw attention to Trump's mancrush on Kim Jong-un, although Haley and Mrs. Warmbier avoid mentioning Trump's name. In February 2019, a few months after she left her job as UN ambassador, Haley publicly disagreed with Trump about Kim:

President Trump has criticized North Korea's role in Warmbier's death in the past. But since he began building his reputation as a diplomat and dealmaker on his budding relationship with North Korea's Kim, his rhetoric has changed dramatically.

... after a meeting with Kim in Vietnam ended abruptly without a deal, the president said that he believed the North Korean strongman when he says he was not responsible for the young American's death.

"He tells me he didn't know about it, and I take him at his word," Trump said of Kim during the press conference. "I don't believe he would have allowed that to happen…. It just wasn't to his advantage to allow that to happen."

Haley responded:

Americans know the cruelty that was placed on Otto Warmbier by the North Korean regime. Our hearts are with the Warmbier family for their strength and courage. We will never forget Otto. ❤️🇺🇸

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 28, 2019

But it doesn't matter. Voters who like Trump -- even voters who used to like Trump but now think Ron DeSantis or some other candidate would be more electable -- aren't ready to say Trump's approach to North Korea was bad. They like to think of him as having been the tough guy who was never pushed around by any foreign leader. There's no reason to think that they'll allow the facts to change their mind.

Republicans have been this way for years. They saw Ronald Reagan as a tough guy who stood up to global bad guys, so they ignore terrorist attacks on Americans in Lebanon, and shrug off Iran-Contra. They regard him as fiscally prudent, so they don't allow themselves to think about the massive budget deficits he ran up. They hate immigration, so they choose to ignore the fact that he was the last president to offer amnesty to immigrants who were in the country illegally.

Republican voters don't want to believe that Trump, a man they voted for twice, allowed himself to be pushed around by a commie dictator. In their eyes, that would make him a Democrat! So they'll keep telling themselves that he was tough and there was nothing wrong with his response to the Warmbier case. No one wants to admit being deceived by a fraud, so they'll ignore the obvious fraudulence of Trump's toughness.