While Republican Party was preparing for its second preview, which was scheduled to take place this Tuesday, the 23rd, in the state of New Hampshire, the hostilities between the former president Donald Trump and former governor Nikki Haley reached its highest level since the start of the campaign. Haley went all or nothing against the former president and made statements on Saturday the 20th that completely distanced her from Trump.
The former allies are effectively in a race against both parties as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis He withdrew his candidacy this Sunday the 21st and declared his support for Trump.
Haley questioned Trump's mental fitness after falsely claiming she failed to prevent the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 “We cannot have another person as president who we doubt is mentally capable is,” he said former UN ambassadorin New Hampshire.
She then expressed something that has already been talked about: that she is not in the running for vice president with Trump. “I always said that. That's a game they're playing that I won't play. “I don’t want to be vice president,” he said, according to the Washington Post.
Nikki Haley at the primary in West Des Moines, Iowa Photo: AP Photo/Abbie Parr
In his harshest attacks to date, he criticized Trump for his dishonesty and his treatment of “dictators.” Trump reinforced this argument at an evening rally when he praised Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “It's good to have a strong man leading your country,” he said, repeating the argument that presidents should have “total immunity” from prosecution for anything they do in office.
Haley also questioned Trump's mental fitness after he confused her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a rally on Friday. President Joe Biden's Democratic campaign, which is seeking reelection, took advantage of the situation on social media and shared a video with images of the two Republicans. “I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on everything, but we agree on one thing: She is not Nancy Pelosi,” Biden said in the release.
At the same event on Friday, Trump opined that Haley lacked the “presidential timbre,” and on Saturday several elected officials from South Carolina took the stage with him a show of strength from Haley's home state that was aimed at making her appear isolated let.
In an interview on CBS News' “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Haley tried to turn those endorsements of Trump into something negative. “That's because I've never cared about elected officials,” she said, adding, “It's not surprising that this group is turning to Trump because he's going to take care of them. “I won't . I will take care of the taxpayers.”
Independent voters eligible to vote in New Hampshire's primary make up 40% of the state's electorate, and Haley is counting on their support. But Suffolk University's daily tracking poll of New Hampshire voters shows Trump leading by 17 percentage points, and a new CNN poll shows him leading by 11 percentage points.
In an interview that aired on Fox News yesterday, Trump reiterated the racist and nationalist theory that the former governor is ineligible for the presidency.
Host Bret Baier asked Trump to explain recent social media posts in which the former president repeatedly misspelled Haley's name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Last week he referred to them as “Nimbra” and “Nimrada”.
“Something just came up,” Trump said. “You know, that’s her name, no matter where she comes from.”
The response was a reference to the false claim that Haley who was born in the US was ineligible to serve as president because her Indian immigrant parents were not citizens when she was born.
While Haley's statements may be confusing to some people, they speak to her style of doing politics: always chameleonlike and moving back and forth between possibilities.
When Nikki Haley was a legislator South Carolina, supported households that were boosted by federal aid. When he ran for governor, he criticized Washington's dependence.
He called once Confederate States flag of the heritage symbol and avoided calls to remove it from the grounds of the state government building. After a racist massacre in Charleston, Haley changed her mind and started a movement to remember her.
When Trump ran for president in 2016, she opposed him before joining his administration as a UN ambassador. Now he is running against Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024, calling him an “agent of chaos.”
For nearly 20 years, Haley has worked to manage the Republican shift to the right, trying to cultivate both the establishment and the fiery conservative base that spawned Trump.
She is seen as a pragmatic mediator or a gowiththewind politician, and as she seeks the Republican nomination, her policy changes have become her opponents' most persistent line of attack.
“Maybe she can be a little bit of a chameleon,” said former Rep. Doug Brannon, a fellow Republican. “The governor and I didn’t get along,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean she’s not a brilliant politician.”
Metamorphosis is a longpracticed political art. Bill Clinton was nicknamed “Slick Willie” and won two terms in the White House. Trump went from strongly supporting abortion rights to telling voters that he was solely responsible for the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Wade wins over white evangelicals.
In the 2024 election campaign, Haley had to face her critics. Trump's avoidance of debates means she and the former president have not clashed personally, but she has vehemently defended herself against his suggestions that she is out of step with today's Republican Party.
“To those who say I'm a moderate, I'm going to ask you or anyone, Trump or anyone on Fox News who says I'm not a conservative, name one thing I wasn't a conservative on,” he said on Friday, also in New Hampshire.
She ticked off a series of measures she signed as governor to cut taxes, tighten voter ID requirements and reform pensions for state workers, among other things. “The difference is who decides who is conservative and who is moderate,” he said.
Rob Godfrey, who served in Haley's administration, said she enjoyed “using the pulpit.”
“She prides herself on being willing to hold accountable people who she believes are doing no good to her constituents,” Godfrey said. He emphasized that his former boss was less concerned with position and ideology than with achieving the most conservative possible result in the politics of “good government”.
“This approach gets on some people’s nerves,” Godfrey said. “It’s always happened.”
Nikki Haley's career path
Nikki Haley, now 52, was first elected to the South Carolina legislature from a suburban Columbia district 20 years ago. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she defeated a 30year legislative veteran in the Republican primary. She once told The New York Times that Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, inspired her to run for office.
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley at a campaign rally in Iowa Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall
Haley quickly rose to a leadership position but ran afoul of her colleagues because she advocated for more recorded voting rather than votes that would be beyond the control of the Legislature. Then he soon sought executive power.
She entered the 2010 gubernatorial primary, which included the lieutenant governor, attorney general and an incumbent congressman. With 48.9% of the primary vote, Haley almost won the nomination. Haley defeated U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett in a runoff, 65% to 35%.
Whit Ayres, a national pollster who worked for Barrett, said the campaign expected Haley's ability to cast a wide net. “These margins say something about his political abilities,” he said.
During the legislative session, Haley voted to receive millions of dollars in federal aid during the 200809 financial crisis to prevent the collapse of America's financial system.
In 2010, however, anger grew over the impact of the crisis on Americans who had lost their homes as the titans of Wall Street were rarely held accountable. This is what came about tea party, which fueled the fire of populism that fueled Trump six years later. Haley, then a gubernatorial candidate, railed against the bailouts and loudly announced her support of Sarah Palin, the 2008 vice presidential candidate and Tea Party favorite.
“When Sarah Palin came along, it was a turning point,” Ayres said. “We knew then that she was real.”
Haley combined her support for Palin with support for more moderates Mitt Romney as he prepared for his second presidential run. She later supported Romney in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. In 2014, she extended her first lead in the general election, winning a second term with 56% of the vote.
As governor, Haley had disputes with fellow Republicans that were often personal. She vetoed spending measures and threatened to campaign against party members in the primary.
She has also made a name for herself on social issues and signed a ban in 2016 abortion with exceptions in the 20th week. That currently doesn't satisfy many members of the Republican Party's national base. But Haley argued against a stricter national ban, saying the conservative position was to leave the matter to state governments.
Haley honed her conservative persona beyond political debates. In December 2013, she told her Instagram followers that she received a gun for Christmas. “I must have been good: Santa gave me a Beretta PX4 Storm,” she posted.
Godfrey, his longtime ally, said the best example of his approach was the 2015 killing of eight black worshipers by a white supremacist in a Charleston church. Haley has previously said that removing the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol is not a priority. After the shooting, she quickly began conversations between different races and parties that led to the removal of the Civil War flag. “She covered white conservatives,” Godfrey said, and “consensusbuilding.”
Koonce responded, “She deserves some of the credit,” but that “shouldn't erase what she said before all those people died doing the right thing.”
As Haley's own ambitions expanded beyond South Carolina, she, like so many Republicans, had to figure out how to take on Trump.
In 2016, she delivered the Republican response to President Barack Obama's final State of the Union address. Haley assessed her party's legal momentum and praised Obama as a barrier breaker and communicator. She called on Republicans to take collective responsibility for the country's problems. And he warned conservatives: “In times of fear, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist this temptation.”
In addition to the problems related to the “conservative doubts” that hang over Haley, there are ethical dilemmas that become a stumbling block in the Republican path.
To understand this, let's go back in time a little. Haley had served in the South Carolina Legislature for less than two years when she applied in late 2006 for a job as an accounting secretary at Wilbur Smith Associates, an engineering and design firm with state contracts.
She needed work. Her parents' clothing store, where she and her husband worked, was in decline. Haley earned just $22,000 as a parttime state legislator. And her husband's own business, which consisted of companies that exchanged goods and services, was making losses.
Wilbur Smith executives thought Haley was too qualified for the accounting job. But because of her wide network of contacts, it was later said, they hired Haley on a salary basis and asked her to explore potential new companies. She never found any, an executive later said. Over the next two years, the company paid him $48,000 for what the manager described as a “passive position.”
This contract, and a later, much more lucrative contract as a fundraiser for a major hospital in her home country, enabled Haley to triple her income in just three years. But they also led her into an ethical gray area that marred her first term as governor of South Carolina.
Nikki Haley and Donald Trump when she was American ambassador to the UN and he was president of the USA. Photo: AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Haley didn't announce her contract with Wilbur Smith until 2010 and kept it secret for over three years. She also pushed for the hospital's top priority — a new heart surgery center — while also being on the payroll. And Haley raised money for the hospital's charitable foundation from lobbyists and corporations that might have had reason to curry favor with her.
The fine line between Haley's personal and public interests became the subject of a State House ethics investigation in 2012. The Republicanled committee concluded that Haley, then the governor, had not violated state ethics rules. But ethics experts and even some of his former supporters say the result was more of an indictment of lax rules and cozy ties between lawmakers and special interests than a justification of his actions.
“Did Nikki Haley act unethically? Maybe,” said Scott English, chief of staff to former Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican and Haley’s predecessor. “Was she acting unethically under South Carolina policy at the time? No way.”
Nikki Haley and Donald Trump
After Trump's victory in November, she was at Trump Tower in New York and spoke to the presidentelect about jobs.
At the start of her 2024 campaign, Haley slightly sidestepped Trump. But on the eve of the first arguments, his criticism became more and more direct, on topics such as Trump's role in the January 6, 2021 Attack on the Capitol.
“I think what happened on January 6th was a terrible day and I think President Trump is going to have to answer for it,” she said at a debate in Iowa on Wednesday.
Now she is beginning to direct her attacks more and more directly against Trump, particularly stabbing at the former president's wounds. After all, as the New York Times pointed out, Haley has “a lot to do and very little time to do it” ahead of the U.S. primaries.
Trump packed arenas and event centers in Concord and Manchester on Friday and Saturday, speaking to enthusiastic crowds as elected Republicans lined up. His event on Saturday evening in Manchester attracted several thousand fans. Meanwhile, Haley visited retail stores and restaurants. About 500 people attended the largest event in Nashua, the Times reported./NYT and AP
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