Nikki Haley just exposed a *key* falsehood about Donald Trump

On conservatism.

In the spring of 2016, as the Republican presidential race had narrowed to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, a non-political person in my life asked me this question: “Who’s more conservative — Trump or Cruz?”

I remember it like it was yesterday. Mostly because I was so gob-smacked that ANYONE would wonder this.

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Like Ted Cruz or not, the 2016 version of the Texas Republican Senator was decidedly conservative. He had a 94% score from the Heritage Foundation. He was named a “Defender of Economic Freedom” that year by the Club for Growth. He was ranked as the 3rd most conservative senator by GovTrack.

Trump, um, was not. As recently as 2001, Trump was a registered Democrat in the state of New York. In 1999, Trump declared that he supported abortion rights. (“I’m very pro-choice,” he said.) In 2016, Trump said he was “fine” with gay marriage. He expressed only passing interest in reducing the national debt. He was opposed to free trade.

Like, it wasn’t close. I barely thought of Trump as a Republican — much less a conservative.

I thought of that conversation last night when I was watching CNN’s Dana Bash interview former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in advance of her loss in Michigan’s presidential primary.

Here’s the key bit from Haley:

Look at what's happened to the Republican Party. The Republican Party is now not just changing based on tone. It's changing based on policy….

…No longer is there any talk about fiscal responsibility. That used to be a pillar for the Republican Party, yet you've got Donald Trump who put us 8 trillion in debt, more than any other president. You've got Republicans now who opened up earmarks and pet projects again in Congress, passing through 7,000 of them last year.

Donald Trump's not talking anything about shrinking government, stopping spending, cutting out the waste, none of that. And then he's changed the whole idea of peace through strength. We used to always talk about the strength of our alliances. Now you've got Donald Trump basically saying he's going to tell Putin to go and invade our allies, who stood with us after 9/11. It's all a shift.

Yes to every word of that.

Just for kicks, I went back and looked at Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech as the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

Here’s the key message:

Four years ago, I know that many Americans felt a fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president. That president was not the choice of our party but Americans always come together after elections. We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than what divides us.

When that hard fought election was over, when the yard signs came down and the television commercials finally came off the air, Americans were eager to go back to work, to live our lives the way Americans always have – optimistic and positive and confident in the future.

That very optimism is uniquely American.

It is what brought us to America. We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America could be better.

Trump has called his political opponents “vermin.” He has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He has said the country is failing, that we are a laughing stock around the world. That the American Dream is dead. That we will be in World War III if he is not elected.

The image of the Republican party (and the country) that Romney outlined just a dozen years ago is fundamentally unrecognizable from where we stand today. It feels like a relic from two centuries ago.

The simple fact exposed by Haley (or that, maybe, she just realized) is that Donald Trump has killed off what conservatism has meant for decades and decades.

And what has he replaced it with? I know there are those in the America First movement who argue that there are actual policy proposals and principles that undergird what I call “Trumpism.”

I am very skeptical of that view. I think it gives Trump WAY too much credit. Bullying is not a principle. Building a wall is not a principle. Saying we need to “Make America Great Again” is not a principle.

I get the desire to try to draw some coherence around Trump’s often-contradictory views on, well, almost everything. Political parties are traditionally organized around a set of agreed-upon policy positions — ideally that can fit on a bumper sticker.

But, I just don’t see that sort of logical cohesion in the current GOP. What draws people to Trump? It’s not his policies (such as they are). It’s his personality.

He’s tough! He tells it like it is! He’s an outsider to the corrupt political process! No one owns him!

And all of that. To the extent people like Trump’s position on, say, immigration or foreign affairs, it’s entirely secondary to their attraction to who they believe he is and what he represents.

Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland and a Trump critic, put it well. “For too long, Republican voters have been denied a real debate about what our party stands for beyond loyalty to Mr Trump,” he said. “A cult of personality is no substitute for a party of principle.”

Yes to that.

The fact is that the likes of Cruz — and virtually every other Republican elected official — have thrown their conservative beliefs (that they held as recently as 2016!) out the window in order to align themselves with Trump.

I get why they have done it: Survival. Trump took over the base of the GOP and made clear that anyone who didn’t line up behind him was no longer welcome in the party.

But, what that, er, evolution means is that we do not have two political parties in this country anymore. We have the Democratic party on one side and a cult of personality built around the whims of one man on the other.

Donald Trump is not now — nor has he ever been — a conservative. He killed off conservatism and replaced it with, well, himself.

After Haley dropped her truth bomb in the interview with Dana, the anchor followed up with this:

“Given the fact that he has won so handily the first four major contests, isn’t it possible that the party has moved, and the party is about Donald Trump, and not what you're describing, which might be the party of yesterday?”

Replied Haley: “It is very possible.”

Um, you think?