Haley’s strategy resembles the one George W. Bush employed when he ran for president in 2000. The Gingrich Congress had just impeached Bill Clinton, thus inflaming partisan hatred in Washington. Bush didn’t condemn the impeachment effort, yet he triangulated off it, describing himself as an outsider who could overcome the divisions stoked by both sides. “I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years,” he declared when accepting the Republican presidential nomination. “And I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect.”

This involved a sleight of hand. In presenting himself as the antidote to the rancor of the impeachment struggle, Bush was suggesting that Clinton—and his vice president, Al Gore, against whom Bush was running—bore equal responsibility for a process that had been thrust upon them. Haley is doing something similar. To cast herself as able to heal the nation from the rancor of the Trump era without alienating Trump’s supporters, she must suggest that the rancor isn’t primarily Trump’s fault. And so, in her book, when she inches toward a condemnation of Trump, she generally returns to her safe harbor: condemning division. Within paragraphs of saying she was “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s remarks about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, she is back to castigating “our politics, media and popular culture,” which are “exaggerating our differences, and weaponizing them.”

Haley is betting that by 2024, even many Republicans will be exhausted by Trump. They won’t want another screeching narcissist; they’ll want someone who can calm things down. But neither will they want to take the blame for having enabled Trump’s ugliness.