Politics

Nikki Haley announces 2024 presidential run

Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley Photo: Shutterstock

Former Trump administration official and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has announced that she is running in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, challenging former President Donald Trump.

Her announcement video says she is the “proud daughter of Indian immigrants.”

“Not Black, not white, I was different,” she explains to GOP primary voters.

Her video highlights several mass shootings in South Carolina from when she was governor, and she says, “We turned away from fear, toward God, and the values that still make our country the freest and greatest in the world.”

“Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections,” she says. “That has to change.”

She then denounces “the Washington establishment,” something she was a part of when she was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., a position that has, at times, been considered Cabinet-rank in the past century.

Haley has not been supportive of LGBTQ+ rights. She opposed marriage equality ever since she was in the House of Representatives, saying that “marriage is between one man and one woman.”

In 2013 court papers filed by her lawyers while she was governor argued that South Carolina shouldn’t have to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally in other states because it “would be contrary to the Tenth Amendment and the sovereign interests of the state.”

More recently, she has taken a hard line against transgender equality, arguing that respecting transgender people is a sign that the U.S. has been “weakened.”

“I look at what’s happening with this woke culture, in our schools, wanting our kids to decide their gender. I look at the fact that we’ve got men playing women’s sports. I look at the fact that we’ve got our military focused on gender pronoun classes,” she said last August.

“What I will tell you is we need to snap out of it,” she continued. “This is absolute craziness. We’ve got enemies trying to come after us, and America has been naive. It’s been weakened. It’s been asleep at the wheel.”

It’s hardly any wonder she was allegedly booed away from a New York Pride event in 2017.

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