They say the room was packed and the crowd enthusiastic for Nikki Haley’s whistlestop visit to Vermont. The import of the former depends on the size of the room. Depending on configuration, the DoubleTree’s meeting rooms hold somewhere between 300 (not impressive) and 1,300 (respectable). As for enthusiasm, I watched her speech on YouTube. To me it was an ambivalent audience. The only time they were unified is when they were shouting down anti-war protesters. They didn’t seem to know exactly how to react to her very conservative talking points or her numerous attacks on Donald Trump.

I have two big takeaways from Sunday’s event. First, none of it matters because Donald Trump is winning the nomination. The GOP rigged the primary system in 2016 to favor the front-runner. The system allowed Trump to cruise to victory after taking an early lead, and it will do the same again this year. Even if Haley wins Vermont, and by all accounts she’s trailing badly here, the game is rigged against her.

And even if it wasn’t, well, the Republican primary electorate is overwhelmingly MAGA. She’s trying to sell a niche product in a mass market.

Second takeaway: The concept of “moderate Republicanism” is dead, dead, dead.

It was pretty clear that Haley tailored her stump speech for a Vermont crowd. She’s not only trying to draw those disaffected by Trump; she’s also trying to get independents and Democrats to vote for her (and get their names on Republican mailing lists, ahem). But still, the post-Tea Party brand of Republicanism — basically Trump without the toxicity — was there for all to see.

Many in the audience desperately did not want to see it. But let’s go down the list of extreme positions espoused by Haley.

First, as previously discussed:

…Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party has left [Gov. Phil] Scott in the position of endorsing an ardent anti-choicer, an advocate of building the border wall, cutting taxes for the rich, increasing the age for receiving Social Security, and imposing something stronger than Ron DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” bill, among other things. Not to mention that whole playing footsie with the cause of the Civil War thing.

In her speech, Haley tossed out a bunch more MAGA-adjacent bread crumbs. Her top concern is federal spending, and she has a pretty radical agenda in mind. Take back all unspent Covid relief funds, which she tagged at $100 billion (actual number much lower), balance the budget — while enacting a series of tax cuts — and “Take as many federal programs as we can and send them down to the state level. Dramatically reduce the size of the federal government.” At a time when red-state governors and lawmakers are fervidly trying to out-radicalize each other, who can possibly think that’s a good idea?

Not mentioned: Raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to somewhere as close as possible to “Deceased.” How do you feel about having to work until 75?

Oh, and she’d roll back President Biden’s restoration of the Internal Revenue Service. She called it “87,000 IRS agents going after middle America,” which is just a lie. Those agents will chase down the wealthy and corporations who’ve been loopholing their way out of paying their fair share. Cutting the IRS is a Republican gift to the party’s oligarchical base.

Haley painted a dire, and not unjustified, picture of the state of global relations. “The world is on fire, literally,” she said, not referring at all to climate change, which appeared nowhere in her speech. She ticked off wars in Europe and the Middle East, North Korea testing intercontinental missiles, Chinese cyberattacks, and Russia “blinding our satellites”, and traced it all to one event: America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Seriously? Our attempt to impose order on Afghanistan lasted longer than any other conflict in our history, and it was never going to work. She wants more?

Also, all of that stuff was going on, or in process, long before our Afghan adventure. We’ve been engaging in ill-conceived conflicts to preserve our “credibility” since the early 1950s at least, and it’s always been pure unadulterated horse hockey. I mean, how do you build credibility by doing stupid shit?

There were a bunch of other brief-as-possible callouts to conservative talking points: the borders being “completely open,” “lawlessness in our cities,” “back to basics in education,” “faith, family and freedom,” and a passing slam on higher education: her son in college “having to write papers he doesn’t believe in just to get an A.”

Also never mentioned: Haley’s retrograde views on reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ issues. Because that would have burst the “moderate” balloon right quick.

If this is what passes for Republican moderation in 2024, or if this is what moderate Republicans have to settle for, then Republican moderation is dead.

It has been for quite a while, really. My late father-in-law was a lifelong and loyal Republican voter. Never would have even considered voting for a Democrat. For him, the last straw was George W. Bush. He voted for Bush in 2000 but never again backed a Republican for President.

He couldn’t stand Bush’s lack of environmental concern, fiscal indiscipline, and obsession with culture-war issues. Since then, we’ve had the Tea Party movement, MAGA, QAnon, and election denialism. Things have only gotten worse.

Maybe that’s why the crowd reaction felt a little off. I’m sure there were Trumpers in the crowd, gulping down the red meat and sitting on their hands when Haley criticized their guy. And I’m sure there were many more “traditional Republicans” who’d desperately like to see the Grand Old Party restored to its former status (2015? 2008? 1999? 1975?1954? When, exactly?) and saw the Haley rally as a life preserver in a stormy sea.

That’s about what it was, and that tells you all you need to know about the conservative movement. It’s allowed itself, quite enthusiastically, to be hijacked by an unprincipled, bigoted Putin cosplayer who tried to overturn an election in 2020 and has made it clear he’s ready to do it again. The GOP could have put a stop to all this after January 6, but there weren’t enough principled Republican senators to convict Trump of insurrection literally days after his mob threatened those senators’ lives.

While watching the Haley speech, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Lou Reed song “Romeo Had Juliette.” It’s the opening track on his great New York album, which reflects the city’s desperate straits in the 1980s. In quick brush strokes, the song contrasts the fallen state of the city with one couple’s doomed love story. After verses describing random violence, bigotry, addiction, environmental collapse, and the relentless grind of poverty, Reed ends with four short lines about a hookup:

The perfume burned his eyes
Holding tightly to her thighs
And something flickered for a minute
And then it vanished and was gone