The former Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who this Wednesday resigned from continuing in the Republican presidential race Given the succession of defeats that Donald Trump has inflicted on her, she is a woman not accustomed to losing throughout her life and political career.
This daughter of Indian emigrants, baptized Nimarata “Nikki” Randhawa when she was born in an inland district of South Carolina 52 years ago, later adopted her husband's surname and also his religion: she left her parents' Sikh creed to convert. to the Methodist faith, two details that helped her build a career in such a Christian and conservative state, dominated by an eminently white Republican Party.
She has boasted on more than one occasion that she was the only “brown” student in her class, in a school where the student body was exclusively white or black (blacks are 27% of the state's population), and she has recalled how In the school theater they reserved the role of Pocahontas for her because of her color.
But this sense of uniqueness only spurred her ambition and character, and she managed, for example, to prevail over her parents – who had planned to marry her to someone of the same origin – and marry Bill Haley, a career military man, whom she once again demonstrated. her strength of will in causing him to be called Michael from now on, the name she preferred.
Both the ethics of her parents – tireless workers who prospered with their own business in the north of the state – and the dominant values in South Carolina have made Nikki Haley a conservative woman who shies away from feminist rhetoric, although she has sometimes said that He had Hillary Clinton as a political model.
From her time as governor in South Carolina, she likes to declare her determination to implement the most beloved agendas of Republicanism: lower taxes and strict immigration control, and in her latest rallies she also threw darts against gender identities, criticizing for example that children spend more time at school learning the new 'fluent pronouns' than the map of their country.
Her relationship with Trump is worth noting because it has gone through several stages: Trump noticed her because of her profile as governor, despite the fact that Haley had leaned towards Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, and he proposed to her to be her country's ambassador in United Nations, even lacking an external career.
Haley accepted but set conditions: she demanded to have direct dialogue with the president – in other words, 'bypass' the Secretary of State and the diplomatic corps – and to have freedom of action, which Trump accepted. When she resigned from her position 20 months later, The New York Times said at the time that she was one of the few Trump aides to leave “with her dignity intact.”
During his time at the UN, he did not distance himself one millimeter from Trump's hard line: he supported the abandonment of the Paris climate agreement, the change of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and the constant pressure on Iran and Syria . In fact, her departure as ambassador had nothing to do with Trump, but rather with internal power struggles. Her diplomatic line was more hawk than dove.
In the years after this brilliant but brief diplomatic career, Trump always spoke well of Haley and Haley did not criticize Trump either.
That was until the party primaries arrived, in which Trump was insulting to her, as he had done with other rivals: he began calling her 'Nimbra' (after Nimarata, her first name) to once again cast doubt on her origins, but went much further by questioning the commitment to his country of her husband Michael, now deployed with the National Guard in the Horn of Africa.
In that, Haley proved to be much more elegant: she did not respond with allusions to her private life and preferred to show Trump's comments as an affront to all military personnel serving abroad, “defending this amazing experiment we call the United States.” “, as he said in one of his last rallies.
EFE
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