Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

Nikki Haley has spent the last year or so building an increasingly untenable platform in an effort to distance herself from her 2024 opponent, Donald Trump—but not by too much, lest she risk alienating the former president’s rabid fanbase.

The Daily Beast political reporter Jake Lahut joins this week’s The New Abnormal podcast to discuss Haley’s shot at the nomination given her Goldilocks-style campaign—and why the “jenga tower of contradictory positions” that make up her White House bid is at risk of collapsing at any moment.

“The thing I always come back to whenever we veer into speculation about the Republican Party is that even if Trump goes away tomorrow, or whenever he dies, someone’s going to inherit all these voters—they’re not all old people,” Lahut said.

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“MAGA is still going to be the dominant coalition in the Republican Party, and it’s going to be hard for someone like Haley to be the non-MAGA candidate in those elections down the line—if, you know, we have elections at all, and all the usual caveats for 2024.”

Then, Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertz joins the podcast to discuss Special Counsel Robert Hur’s incendiary attacks on President Joe Biden’s memory—and what the media coverage of his report says about the state of the political press in 2024.

“The amount of coverage that is provided is just wildly out of step,” Gertz said. “This is a case where one guy—a Republican appointee—has made a critique of the president and rather than viewing it through that lens and trying to compare it to what others have said about Biden, you have [news outlets] using it to really rain down a ton of negative coverage in that vein.”

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.