Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley may be the last challenger standing against former President Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary, but her personnel decisions are indicative of a candidate better suited to the Democratic primary.
Over the weekend, the Washington Examiner’s esteemed investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky broke the news that Haley’s New Hampshire state director, Tyler Clark, has a long history of lobbying for various left-wing organizations and causes.
Clark’s resume is impressive, for a Democrat. In 2020, he lobbied for the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a nonprofit group that advocates gun control, racial justice, environmentalism, and other left-wing causes. The fund is a part of the Arabella Advisors network, a dark money group that funds a wide range of left-wing organizations.
Besides lobbying for the Sixteen Thirty Fund, last year, Clark was lobbying for the New Hampshire chapters of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Civil Liberties Union. With ties to the Arabella network, the ACLU, and the AFT, there is very little Clark could do to burnish his liberal credentials.
The revelation was so stunning that Trump even mentioned the news during a rally in New Hampshire over the weekend.
“It was just reported that Nikki Haley’s state director in New Hampshire — this is a very bad one, listen carefully — Tyler Clark, did anyone ever hear of him?” the former president said. “He was a lobbyist for the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which is managed by Arabella Advisors, which is the largest Democrat dark money network in the country and considered public enemy No. 1. That’s who’s managing her campaign. Does that tell you something, perhaps?”
Well, Trump is right. It does tell you something.
Presidential administrations are typically filled with alumni of the winning candidate’s campaign, so the personnel of a presidential campaign is often a glimpse into the personnel of a potential administration. Candidates form strong relationships with senior campaign staff, senior staff hire lower-level staff and form relationships with them, and thus a network of like-minded people is created that ultimately forms the basis of the presidential administration as those people fill the 4,000 political appointments that come with a new president.
And this is what makes Haley’s decision to hire him so disturbing. The ACLU and the AFT alone are responsible for the proliferation of some of the most damaging cultural trends in recent history. The ACLU has backed efforts to force schools to allow men to use the girl’s bathroom, and the AFT militantly fought efforts to keep schools open and has openly advocated exposing schoolchildren to pornographic books masquerading as “LGBT stories.”
If you consider the hiring of Clark within the context of Haley’s willingness to take donations from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn who has ties to Jeffrey Epstein and has a long history of supporting Democratic causes, including the defamation lawsuit against Trump by E. Jean Carroll, a more complete picture begins to emerge.
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Haley isn’t afraid to take donations from Democrats and hire Democrats because she doesn’t plan to govern as a conservative. By hiring Clark, Haley is telegraphing the kind of political appointee that her administration would hire if the public were to elect her to the presidency, and thus the kind of policy that would be enacted by her administration.
Regardless of whatever campaign promises a candidate makes, personnel is ultimately the determiner of policy. If Haley were serious about governing as a conservative president, she would not have hired a lobbyist for left-wing causes to run her New Hampshire campaign. As the adage goes, “You are the company you keep.”
