This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“The difference between humans and animals? Animals would never allow the dumbest ones to lead the pack.” —A meme Maj. Michael Haley posted on X, tagging Donald Trump, the GOP, and news outlets including CNN and the AP
Michael Haley waded into the primary battle between his wife and Donald Trump this week, armed with … a meme? More specifically, armed with a photograph of a wolf, overlaid with this statement: “The difference between humans and animals? Animals would never allow the dumbest ones to lead the pack.” A watermark on the image attributes it to the meme generator Mematic. The virile jab, at pub time, has more than 5.7 million views.
This odd rejoinder from Nikki Haley’s husband, who is currently deployed to Djibouti with the National Guard, comes on the heels of an increasingly tense back-and-forth between the two top GOP presidential candidates ahead of the South Carolina Republican primary.
On the campaign trail this year, Trump had already insulted Haley’s intelligence, her clothing choices (“a fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy”), and her birth name. In the latest round of sparring, at a campaign rally in South Carolina over the weekend, he went further, insinuating that Haley’s husband had deployed to flee the former governor’s presence.
“Where’s her husband? Oh, he’s away,” Trump said, with a wry smile, in a video captured of the rally. “He’s gone.”
Nikki Haley swiftly clapped back at Trump (her former boss when she was U.N. ambassador), tweeting that her husband is “deployed serving our country, something you know nothing about.” She added: “Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being the commander in chief.”
It was a big change from the early days of her presidential campaign, when Haley largely avoided pointed attacks at Trump. Now, it seems, the gloves are off. The former president’s recent comments have unleashed a round of media appearances and ads from her team arguing that Trump cares little for veterans.
In a post retweeted by her husband (relationship goals?), Haley wrote, “When Donald Trump attacks one veteran, he’s attacking all of them. If he can’t understand the sacrifice our soldiers and veterans give for this country, then he doesn’t deserve to be commander in chief.”
Michael Haley’s wolf tweet is a bit more cryptic. He tagged various large media outlets—a move that could mean he wanted as many people as possible to catch his sick burn. Or, I guess, it could imply that the organizations are also helmed by not-so-smart leaders.
Regardless, the wolfy insult is not something Haley made up; versions of this meme appear to circulate fairly frequently in right-wing circles and show up as motivational content for LinkedIn bro types. (It is not a Trump-specific insult.)
We at Slate could not fact-check the veracity of the meme’s animal-IQ hierarchy claim. (Are we absolutely sure there aren’t other creatures out there that choose dumb pack leaders?) But we couldn’t help but correct the record on one inaccuracy: Humans, it should be said, are animals. Even if we sometimes “allow the dumbest ones to lead the pack.”
