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NikkiHaley.jpg

Nikki Haley Announces Her 2024 Presidential Campaign

By Jen Maravegias | Politics | February 15, 2023 |

By Jen Maravegias | Politics | February 15, 2023 |

NikkiHaley.jpg

Nikki Haley, former Governor of South Carolina, has launched her 2024 Presidential Campaign and kicked off the new political season. It’s clearly going well.

There’s been a lot of speculation in the last few campaign cycles that if we’re going to get a woman in the White House it will be a Republican woman. Maybe that’s true. Will it be Nikki Haley? Probably not.

Although she’s the first member of the Republican Party to announce a run against TFG, it seems likely that she’s going to face a lot of competition in the primary. The one guy who is going to stand in her way, if he decides to run, is Ron DeSantis. The GOP loves him.

DeSantis and Haley have both previously pledged not to run against Trump. But Nikki Haley has nothing to lose. Unlike DeSantis, whose 2018 gubernatorial win Trump is still taking credit for. For all of the hushed whispering in the GOP about distancing themselves from Trump, he’s a bully who has derailed competitors’ campaigns in the past. It’s unclear if DeSantis has the stones to stand up to him (ahem, Ted Cruz, ahem.)

But back to Nikki. Yesterday Politico ran a list of things to know about her. Most of it is fluff, but some things that stood out to me were the fact that her parents never said “I love you” to each other, and sent their kids to their rooms with a glass of water if they were upset about something instead of comforting the children. This is how you raise sociopaths. I saw it on an episode of Criminal Minds once. There’s also an item about how she decided she didn’t like her future husband’s name so she … started referring to him by a different name until it stuck. See? Sociopath.

She talks a good political game out of both sides of her mouth, occasionally appearing like one of the last reasonable Republicans. We should not forget that she ran as a Tea Party Reformer. All of her criticism of Trump’s policies and politics have been mealy-mouthed at best. Like a lot of people in the Republican party, she went from denouncing him to praising him as soon as he made it to the general election in 2016. She’s never stood in opposition to him and also doesn’t think racism is an issue in this country. (Stage whisper: it is)

During her first year in the Governor’s office she signed a bill that, among other things, required police officers to check the immigration status of people they stopped or arrested if they suspected they might be in the country illegally. I’m going to guess that didn’t go well for the Black and brown people of South Carolina. On the flip side of that, Haley also signed a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina House after the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. That raised her political profile across the country. But then she went and both-sided the Confederacy by saying that the flag was “a symbol of respect, integrity and duty” and blamed Dylann Roof for “hijacking” it. The Confederate flag was a symbol of hate long before Roof posed with it for a picture.

According to LGBTQNation, Haley opposed the transphobic bathroom bills in South Carolina while she was Governor. But she’s also a marriage traditionalist who doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage as legal. She opposes trans kids participating in sports and supports DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, to which I say toss her in the bin with that other TERF from across the pond.

As we gear up, or batten down our hatches, for this political season to begin don’t be fooled by the superficial things about Nikki Haley that make her appealing to white liberals. She may be a woman of color, but she’s not the woman of color we need leading our country.