Nikki Haley Pulled a Bizarre Stunt With Her Husband. Maybe We All Should.

As a politician, Nikki Haley has supported or proposed bills banning all sorts of things, like abortions after six weeks, or the social media platform TikTok. But her history of banning bills, as it were, goes back even further than her government career: Early on in her relationship with her husband, she banned him from being called Bill.

Haley’s husband is now known as Michael Haley, but as the former South Carolina governor and current Republican presidential candidate wrote in her 2012 memoir Can’t Is Not an Option, he used to go by Bill. In an anecdote that resurfaced on social media this week and quickly spread around the web, Haley told the story of sitting then-Bill down one day to tell him that his name wasn’t Bill anymore.

According to Haley, who started dating her future husband as a college student, he just didn’t look like a Bill, so she asked him what his whole name was. Upon hearing that it was William Michael, she de-bill-itated him, rechristened him Michael, and that’s what everybody started calling him.

Was this an early sign of Haley’s executive decisionmaking prowess—or a glimpse into a certain steamroller/flat-surface dynamic in their relationship? Leadership—or sociopathy? Probably depends on your perspective. Haley’s apparent conviction that she is better qualified to decide what to call people than the people themselves would seem to shed some light on some comments she’s made about transgender issues. But to be fair, maybe Michael fka Bill was looking for exactly the sort of woman who would take over his life, someone to make it so he never had to think anything more complicated than “Yes, dear.” Some people are!

However you read Haley’s decree, though, it’s hard not to take issue with her claim that her then boyfriend didn’t “look like a Bill” because he “looks like a Michael.” His actual first name left her with plenty of options for a rebranding—most first names come with one ready-made nickname, if that, but William brings with it an unusual number of them: In addition to Bill, there’s Billy, Will, Willy, and even an out-of-left-field choice like Liam.

But Haley needn’t have bothered with any of those other choices because whoever started calling Bill “Bill” in the first place got it right. It very literally fit the bill! Yes, I have reviewed the evidence—i.e., done a Google Image search—and this man looks like a Bill to me. His face is quite round and almost boyish, but this is offset by his usually close-cropped bald head, conjuring a general impression of humble mildness, which is very much what the name “Bill” evokes. A Michael is a little flashier, a little less likely to let his girlfriend rename him, frankly. The fact that Haley was able to strong-arm unassuming Bill into a new name may be the ultimate proof of his essential Bill-ness.

Is looking at a few pictures online really enough information for me to presume to make such a call? Maybe not—is it possible it’s never appropriate to unilaterally decide to rename another person?—but at least I’m looking at pictures of this man over a period of years rather than basing my judgment on knowing someone for a few weeks or months or however long it took for Haley to be comfortable enough to change her future husband’s name. While it’s probably too late for Michael to go back to his old name now—at this point, he’s been Michael for longer than he was Bill, and maybe he likes it—it’s nice to imagine a world where he reclaims it, where some kind of populist uprising forces Haley to relent, where, together, we can re-Bill him.