She's still hoping to pull off a big upset in the race for the White House. For two years she carried the voice of Donald Trump on the international stage. Today, Nikki Haley appears to be the last obstacle standing between the former president and the Republican nomination for the presidential election in November.
After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threw his support behind Donald Trump on Sunday, placing him a distant second in the Iowa caucus that opened the Republican primary on Jan. 15, he is actually only matched by Nikki Haley, who came in third , claim a stunning victory in New Hampshire .
A “globalist,” according to Trump
To win, the former governor of South Carolina, the only woman in the race and the new darling of the American right, is putting forward a very classic conservative argument: a state considered hypertrophied, too much debt and too high taxes, and an immigration system , who is accused of laxity. She advocates raising the retirement age for new entrants to the labor market in order to save the social security and health insurance systems from bankruptcy.
Donald Trump constantly calls her a “globalist.” “She loves the world, I love America first,” he said during a meeting in Iowa. He accuses him across the board of wanting to “increase taxes, drain social security” or even “open the borders,” without specifying on what basis.
Pretty similar programs
But in reality their programs differ little, except in Ukraine, which Nikki Haley wants to continue to support massively, while Donald Trump is proud to act as a mediator between Kiev and Moscow. The fight is therefore essentially a question of style and generation.
After long sparing the person who appointed her to the prestigious post of ambassador to the United Nations in 2017 despite her lack of international experience, Nikki Haley is holding back less and less. “Whether it is deserved or not, chaos ensues,” she has repeated in recent weeks, perhaps alluding to the multiple impeachments against Donald Trump. “We will not survive four more years of chaos,” emphasizes Nikki Haley, 52, putting outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, and his former boss, 77, back to back.
The candidate calls for “electing a leader of a new generation and leaving negativity and liabilities behind.” She also stepped up her criticism this weekend, publicly questioning a possible age-related change in Donald Trump's “mental abilities.” He himself has been calling them “sparrow brains” for months. He apparently does not forgive him for the crime of lese majeste of breaking his promise not to run against him if he were to run in 2024.
Entered politics in 2004
Nikki Haley claims to see these attacks as a sign of her upward trend in the polls, due to her remarkable performances in the debates between Republican candidates, in which Donald Trump did not deign to participate. She was particularly notable for her more moderate speech than her competitors on abortion rights. The issue has caused his party a series of electoral disappointments since the Supreme Court struck down the country's constitutional protections for the right to abortion. She advocates for a “national consensus” on the issue, both to ban “late-term abortions” and against prison sentences for abortions in states that ban them.
Born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, she is the daughter of a couple of Indian immigrants of the Sikh religion. She is a mother of two and married to a National Guard officer currently stationed in Djibouti. She burst onto the political scene when she was elected to the legislature in her home state of South Carolina in 2004, then rose to national prominence in 2010 during her campaign for governor.
After her election, Nikki Haley maintained her right-wing stance, showing hostility to unions and taxes, gay marriage, and refusing to accept Syrian refugees into her state. On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered a church in Charleston and killed nine African-American worshipers. After a long period of refusal, she then ordered the removal of the Confederate flag, a symbol of the state's slavery past, from South Carolina's legislature. In a few months she will know whether her different positions have allowed her to achieve her goal: to be the first woman in the Oval Office of the White House in four years.