Nikki Haley – the Republican taking on Donald Trump to become president
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In accepting president-elect Donald Trump’s invitation to serve as America’s UN ambassador in late 2016, just weeks after that earth-tilting election, one of the key conditions of second-term South Carolina governor Nikki Haley was that she be made a member of the president’s cabinet - an unusual arrangement for the UN post in Republican administrations.
According to CNN and others, Mr Trump had first considered Ms Haley for secretary of state, but she withdrew from consideration citing a lack of foreign policy experience. With the UN as her foreign policy training ground, many observers speculated that Ms Haley may seek to lay the groundwork for a presidential run.
While in the UN job, she was both the “proud daughter of Indian immigrants” and a sharp face for the America First agenda. Ms Haley, or Nimrata Nikki Haley (née Randhawa), somehow cracked the code for (occasionally) distancing herself from Mr Trump without threatening him and incurring his wrath. Virtually alone among the first batch of cabinet members, she both came in and went out on her own terms, returning to South Carolina and family with a simple “it’s time” explanation that only added to intrigue about her future intentions.
Ms Haley has already been the future - or one possible future - of the Republican Party. As a young governor she was a “rising star”, and the thinking went that a candidate like her might hold the key to a post-Obama GOP intent on showing her party’s own diversity. A competence-first candidate, but a likeable and relatable one who could appeal to moderate Republicans, Independents, and even curious Democrats - the GOP’s own appeal to those who both voted for “Hope and Change” in 2008 and later fell in with the Tea Party backlash to follow. She was against both the Big Government response to the global financial crisis and the Bush-Cheney policies that had engorged and overextended the national security state in the Global War on Terrorism.
After the Romney-Ryan ticket lost to the second Obama-Biden bid, the Republican National Committee led by Reince Priebus, 41, commissioned a kind of “autopsy”. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal - also 41, and like Ms Haley, an Indian American leading a Southern state - said the Republicans needed to “stop being the stupid party”. A subsequent GOP report encapsulated an emerging conventional wisdom that the party faced a bleak future if it didn’t shed its “stuffy old men” image. Ms Haley, along with other 40-something luminaries like Marco Rubio, the junior US senator from Florida, were specifically cited as emerging party leaders who should figure prominently in a GOP makeover for the 21st century.
Then came Mr Trump - who shed only the “stuffy”, but with relish - and the vision was largely scrapped. Mr Rubio became “Little Marco”. With Mr Trump’s sinking of “Low Energy Jeb”, the Bush dynasty was vanquished. Ms Haley seemed to instantly apprehend the new landscape - and, of course, joined the Trump administration - but she seemed also to know how to maintain the lane she had carved out for herself as governor.
Bitter primaries battle
Ms Haley is taking on Mr Trump in the Republican primaries in which she is battling for second place in what has turned out to be a bitter fight.
In early November, her debate rivalry with Vivek Ramaswamy, a master of Trumpian bluster, was labelled “the most gripping storyline of the GOP presidential primary, even if it doesn’t affect the outcome”.
Ms Haley has rarely lost her cool. But in the November debate, when Mr Ramaswamy attacked her parenting as hypocritical - slamming her for criticising his use of Chinese-linked TikTok “while her own daughter was actually using the app a long time ago” - something in her seemed to snap. When he got to “...so, you might want to take care of your family first”, she fired back, saying: “Leave my daughter out of your voice.”
It was an interesting word choice - “voice” - as if Ramaswamy’s vocal utterings were all there was to him. Thick air but thin gruel. Then came contempt: “You’re just scum,” she muttered on mic, not even looking at the younger man. In almost 15 years of listening to Ms Haley’s voice, I have never heard her say anything like that. Clearly, a line had been crossed.
Ms Haley and her family are close. Her former aide, Rob Godfrey, calls her decision to run for president a family undertaking, but not in the throwaway Washington-speak one often hears.
The extended Randhawa-Haley family spans several South Carolina worlds. In 2019, the candidate and her husband, Michael, bought a home on the exclusive Kiawah Island - which features a sprawling golf resort complex - for $2.4 million, according to Charleston’s Post and Courier. It’s only 72 or so miles as the crow flies from the small city of Bamberg, where Nimrata Nikki Randhawa was born in 1972, but a world away economically - and racially. Her parents, Ajit and Raj Randhawa, eventually left Bamberg for Lexington, an upscale community enclave outside the state capital of Columbia.
Ms Haley does not come from wealth. Call it a Southern nicety (or naivete), but even though the Carolinas have grown into one of the country’s most dynamic regions, people who grew up here still don’t much like to talk about family finances in mixed company. But some investigative reporting over the summer put the extended family’s mammon under the microscope, Forbes summarising with this leader: “At the height of her career, Ms Haley’s family was short on cash. She quit the Trump administration - and made millions.”
According to Kavya Gupta’s reporting, even as their daughter represented America at the UN, Ms Haley’s parents had gotten into serious debt (over $1 million) and were at risk of losing their home. (It ultimately was sold by court order, at a loss, in July 2018; Ms Haley resigned from the UN post three months later). Ms Haley and her husband, Michael, had previously lent her parents significant sums of money, but she now had less than $100,000 in her bank accounts and her annual salary as ambassador was $185,000.
When she resigned from the UN post, she did not give a specific reason, saying simply: “I can tell you, it is time.” But in her resignation letter to Mr Trump, she also said, “As a businessman, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up.”
Ms Haley has since amassed a net worth estimated at $8 million, according to Gupta’s Forbes story, which said she had followed “a tried-and-true playbook for politicians looking to cash in on their fame”. She received millions in speaking fees, wrote two books (a second memoir and a Thatcher-referencing tribute to women leaders), served as a consultant, and joined several corporate boards including for the Boeing Company.
As UN ambassador, she found herself in the crosshairs of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group, which in 2018 alleged that Ms Haley had underreported by tens of thousands of dollars the value of four “luxury private flights” between New York and Washington and South Carolina, which were provided by “friends” in the business community and which she took with her husband. Ms Haley’s federal disclosure valued the flights using estimates based on the costs of commercial flights along the same routes, not the tenfold higher costs of private jets. Ms Haley said that each flight qualified for an exception based on her relationships with the businessmen.
What to make of her money-making moves? Forbes’s painfully precise forensic accounting seemed partly to tell a story of a devoted daughter (and son-in-law) who repeatedly forgave her parents’ financial foibles, and who hustled to keep helping them at a time of serious need. But it also casts a critical eye on her personal enrichment.
In a narrative full of real estate transaction details - square footages, mortgages taken on and taken over, an intra-family sale of a commercial strip-mall property for $5 “and love and affection” - a deeper story is buried, one perhaps best appreciated by those familiar with South Carolina’s landscape and racial geography. But it’s a more universal American story. Ms Haley has consistently described herself as “the proud daughter of Indian immigrants”, sometimes adding, “who came to this country legally”.
“Ajit and Raj Randhawa were well-educated, well-off Sikhs in the Punjab region of India. But despite their high social status, the Randhawas wanted more for their family - the opportunities that only America could offer,” Ms Haley wrote in her memoir Can’t is Not an Option: My American Story, published in early 2012 when she was barely a year in office as governor.
After an initial move to Vancouver so her father Ajit could complete a PhD in biology at the University of British Columbia, the family, which now included Ms Haley’s two older siblings, moved to Bamberg, South Carolina, when he was offered a job at Voorhees College, a historically black, church-affiliated school in the neighbouring town of Denmark. Now Voorhees University, it has around 500 students.
The Randhawas were the first Indians in Bamberg, a majority black town of around 2,500 in the early 1970s when Nimrata Nikki was born. Some social media wags like to insinuate that Ms Haley “changed her name” for political advantage. In fact, Nikki is her legal middle name. The younger Nikki hadn’t looked like anyone else in Bamberg, and while she doesn’t speak or write critically of the community, she is frank about the “What are you?” racial interrogations she faced growing up there.
A decade after the Civil Rights Movement, de facto segregation still prevailed. In the book, she recounts a third-grade playground encounter that shaped her awareness of race relations and how to define her own place: “I walked over and noticed that [the children] were divided into two groups, a black group and a white group. One of the kids in the black group was holding the ball... I walked over and said, ‘Are we playing today?’ And one girl said, ‘We are. You’re not.’
“I was stunned. ‘Why?’ I asked. She replied, ‘You can play with us, but you have to pick a side. Are you white, or are you black?’ she replied. I was in a panic. Then I saw a solution: change the subject. I grabbed the ball from the girl and ran as fast as I could to the field. ‘I’m neither!’ I yelled. ‘I’m brown!’ Before I knew it, we were all playing kickball on the playground.” It “wouldn’t be the first time” she sought to change the subject on race, she added.
The Haley surname came via marriage. She met her future husband on her first weekend at Clemson University. When it came to religious faith, the conversion was hers. She writes, “When I attended Sikh worship services as a young person, I gained an appreciation for God’s presence, but because the ceremony was conducted in Punjabi, I never truly understood the message... I converted to Christianity because the teachings of Christ spoke to me in a way I could understand and that would help me live my life”, both in marriage and parenthood.
The couple were married at Saint Andrew By-the-Sea United Methodist Church in Hilton Head in 1996. They have two children, Rena and Nalin. Michael Haley is an officer in the South Carolina Army National Guard and spent half of 2023 on deployment in Africa while his wife campaigned. She has spoken and written about how much she values his counsel, and the couple talk regularly whenever he travels for training and deployments.
In between university and getting started in politics with her 2004 run for the South Carolina House, 87th district, Ms Haley worked for a couple of years for a solid waste management company in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the “farthest north” she’d ever lived, she has joked, until she took up the UN post more than 20 years later. The young accountant later returned to bookkeeping for her mother’s small “upscale fashion” business, Exotica International, which Raj originally launched “out of the living room” in Bamberg and had taken upstate to Lexington. The move took the Randhawas from a community that today is around 54 per cent black, with a median income of around $30,000, to a more than 80 per cent white suburb with more than double the income level.
On an October morning ten years ago, as I gathered material for what became a book about Ms Haley’s governorship and ambassadorship, I visited both the Methodist church in Lexington that she attended with Michael and the children, and a gurdwara (temple) in Chapin, 14 miles to the north, where the governor’s parents were among the most active members of the Sikh Religious Society of South Carolina. The newly inaugurated hall smelled of fresh carpet. Set along a two-lane highway among single-family-home subdivisions, the serenely gardened grounds were enclosed by a high chain link fence. I didn’t ask about it, but it also looked new, and I wondered. A year earlier, in August 2012, there had been a mass shooting at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, by an avowed white supremacist and army veteran who killed six American Sikhs and wounded four others before shooting himself to death when police arrived. A seventh victim died later of his wounds.
As governor, Ms Haley confronted the horrific murders of nine black Americans by a 21-year-old avowed white supremacist who insinuated himself into a Wednesday night Bible study on June 17 2015 at the century-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. The killer, who fled and drove north by northwest before authorities received a tip from a driver around Gastonia, NC, had previously put a picture of himself with a Confederate flag on the internet, along with a hateful anti-black racist manifesto.
In the days and weeks following the murders, as the governor attended funerals for all nine victims, she and South Carolina were confronted with a wave of renewed calls to take down the polarising Confederate battle flag that had flown from a flagpole on the SC State House grounds for the past decade and a half, having been relocated from the top of the capitol dome (where it first went up in 1961, in defiance of the South’s budding civil rights movement).
Ms Haley had been challenged about the flag almost as soon as she was elected, with the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Benjamin Jealous, calling it “one of the most perplexing examples of the contradictions of this moment in history” that the state’s “first governor of colour continues to fly the Confederate flag in front of her state’s capitol”. Rob Godfrey, her spokesperson at the time, put out a statement that read in part, “revisiting that issue is not part of the governor’s agenda”.
But Ms Haley ultimately did revisit that issue after the Mother Emanuel murders, and after initially hesitating, she made the decision in a late-night phone call with her husband to call for the flag’s permanent removal, rallying reluctant Republican lawmakers to the cause. It is, without question, the gubernatorial achievement she is best known for nationally.
When asked what aspects of her governorship may have been less appreciated in national narratives, Mr Godfrey cited effectiveness in disaster response. In October 2015, one of the deadliest weather events in South Carolina’s history - a “thousand-year flood” - dumped trillions of gallons of water across the state, with some Lowcountry towns hit with as much as two feet of rainfall. Nineteen people were killed, hundreds of homes were destroyed, more than 30,000 people experienced power outages, 51 dams failed, and statewide losses totalled more than $1 billion.
Despite the scale and intensity of the disaster, Mr Godfrey said Ms Haley’s operation had been a model of effectiveness, coordinating with federal and state emergency response agencies, law enforcement, businesses, nonprofits, faith-based and other civil society organisations, and generally “overcommunicating” before, during, and after the storm to announce the state’s plan and response.
Challenge of ‘voter intensity’
In her home state this winter, the biggest challenge for Ms Haley - or any other current Republican candidate - may be what Mr Godfrey called “voter intensity”, with many of the GOP’s likely voters saying they’ll only turn out for Mr Trump. How the former president’s court proceedings for the multiple criminal indictments against him will play out in the coming months is anyone’s guess, as is whether the martyrdom motivation to Mr Trump’s base would outweigh any countervailing suppression of turnout (or ticket-switching) among his more lukewarm supporters, not keen to put a convicted criminal back in the Oval.
The Reaganite Ms Haley seems to be tuned to a different frequency of “make America great again” than Trump-loving conservative radio. “We need to go in a new direction,” she is fond of saying, often invoking the party’s losses under Trump in the 2018 midterms - and, yes, in 2020.
Her bottom line: “I have never lost a race.” It’s a shrewd way of saying that Mr Trump lost in 2020 without having to say it. She has never gone in for the denialism over the 2020 results, and she criticised Mr Trump in remarks made shortly after the January 6 2021 revolt at the US Capitol, saying the defeated incumbent “went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him... We can’t let that ever happen again”.
If she was already thinking privately about running when she offered her remarks, she seemed not to expect to face Mr Trump: “I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture. I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.” (She also said she thought Trump truly believed the election had been subject to widespread fraud).
Ms Haley eventually muted her criticisms about January 6 when it became clear that her party would not rebuke the former president. She said she would not run against her former boss. And in the first GOP debate of 2023, when Fox News moderator Brett Baier said to the eight participants “You all signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee” and asked, “If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice?”, Ms Haley was one of six candidates to raise hands (along with Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Mr Ramaswamy, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, and former vice president Mike Pence), saying they would support Mr Trump as the nominee even if he is convicted.
Her most consistent criticism of Mr Trump has been over the increase in federal spending and ballooning of the national debt on his watch. She is running as a pro-business fiscal conservative and a transatlantic, transpacific foreign policy hawk: the aspirational rhetoric if not quite the empirical legacy of Reaganism.
Critics like Mr Ramaswamy disparage Ms Haley as a neocon, and she doesn’t exactly dispel the perception. A key campaign cog and an adviser throughout her career in politics has been Jon Lerner, a longtime pollster and adviser both to Ms Haley and Mr Pence during the Trump administration. Mr Lerner told Bloomberg in 2017, “My hostility to anti-American authoritarian governments that began with anti-Communism remains my primary motivation”, adding, “That manifests itself today in places that include North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia”.
That credo, along with all-weather support for Israel and scorn for the hypocrisies of many UN member states who promote “human rights” internationalism while abusing and repressing human beings at home, just about sums up Ms Haley’s agenda while serving as US ambassador to the international organisation.
Political role models
Ms Haley sprinkles references to more conventional political role models across her speeches and writings. Her first memoir, Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story, saw the first-term governor even citing Hillary Clinton as an early inspiration, despite saying she had significant policy differences with the former first lady and US senator from New York. (That was in 2012; don’t expect to hear her admiring Mrs Clinton in this campaign). In its review, the Economist compared Ms Haley to the grocer’s daughter Margaret Thatcher. A second memoir, With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace, followed in late 2019, a year after Ms Haley left the Trump administration. In that one, she saluted Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN envoy and the first woman to hold the post.
Ms Haley’s third book - published in late 2022 as she must have been prepping this long-expected presidential run, announced in February - made the Thatcherism explicit. If You Want Something Done... snipped from its title from the future Iron Lady’s 1965 quip at the National Union of Townswomen’s Guilds Conference: “If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.”
It’s a line Ms Haley tucked into the first GOP primary debate in August when she was the only woman among the eight candidates (brought in by the Republican National Committee to have something to throw up on American screens in Trump’s absence).
If she can pull through the coming Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary with reasonably strong finishes, Ms Haley’s next challenge will be her home state. There will be just over a month between New Hampshire’s January 23 primary and the Palmetto State’s turn on February 24.
Mr Godfrey, who is now a South Carolina political consultant, makes the case that the state historically has been “the most important early primary state” in the GOP’s nomination process for the presidency. The winner in the state has gone on to become the party’s nominee for the fall general election in every cycle but one, in 2012. That year’s South Carolina contest saw eventual nominee Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and future junior US senator for Utah, place second after Newt Gingrich, a former US House Speaker from Georgia and a pre-Trumpian enfant terrible.
According to Mr Godfrey, Ms Haley “has a strong base of people here who know her, like her, and have supported her”, adding that the outcomes of the earlier Iowa and New Hampshire contests will significantly shape the conversation among South Carolina’s highly engaged conservative primary voters. Voters will have several weeks of intense campaigning to get reacquainted with their former governor: the state GOP voted in June to push back the Republican primary by several weeks, giving candidates more time than in recent cycles to barnstorm the state’s first-in-the-south contest.
This is also an unusual cycle, Mr Godfrey acknowledged, with former president Trump running “as an incumbent, for all intents and purposes”. Current South Carolina governor Henry McMaster, with whom Mr Godfrey has also worked, officially endorsed Mr Trump. But Ms Haley has always been “disciplined and laser-focused on the job at hand”, Mr Godfrey said, and “she has the campaign infrastructure and resources for the longer haul”.
Would Ms Haley accept a running-mate invitation from Mr Trump, who has derided her in this campaign as “overly ambitious” and a “birdbrain”? Ms Haley has repeatedly said “I don’t run for second” and that she is not interested in the vice presidency - though she has been unusually direct in her criticisms of vice president Kamala Harris, saying the prospect of a President Harris “should send a chill up every American spine”.
Ms Haley’s independence could be a liability for Mr Trump, and may outweigh whatever electability advantage his campaign could see in teaming up with her against Joe Biden and Ms Harris. Still, when Newsmax’s Eric Bolling recently asked Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, if he would consider tapping Ms Haley for vice president, she responded: “Crazier things have happened. I don’t know, I would never say never with Donald J. Trump.”
Mr Godfrey waved off such speculation, noting Ms Haley’s own statements. He also dismissed the idea that her current run could also be about laying the groundwork for a 2028 campaign, with strong second-place finishes cementing her status in the GOP firmament. Knowing Ms Haley, he said: “If she and her family made this decision to run for 2024, she’s all in, and she’s not thinking about 2028.”
Jason A. Kirk is a professor of political science at Elon University in North Carolina and author of Rising Star: The Meaning of Nikki Haley, Trump’s Unlikely Ambassador (The University of Arkansas Press, 2021)
