Trump makes fun of Nikki Haley’s given name. This is just another instance of his racial attacks on opponents

On Friday, Donald Trump made fun of Nikki Haley’s birth name on social media. This is just another instance of how the former president uses racial and ethnic prejudice to target people of color, particularly his political opponents.

In a tweet on his Truth Social account, Trump called Indian immigrant Haley’s daughter, Nimbra, many times. Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, the former governor of South Carolina, was born in Bamberg, South Carolina. She has always gone by “Nikki,” her middle name. In 1996, she married and adopted the surname “Haley.”

Haley was referred to as “Nimbra” three times in the tweet by Trump, who is the son, grandchild, and twice married to immigrants. He also said that Haley “doesn’t have what it takes.”

The assault occurred four days before the primary in New Hampshire, where Haley is attempting to position herself as the only competitive Trump substitute in the Republican race for the 2024 nomination.

Trump’s tweet was a continuation of his prior assaults, in which he made reference to Haley’s given name (spelling it incorrectly as “Nimrada”) and made the erroneous claim that she is not qualified to be president because her parents were not citizens of the United States when she was born in 1972.

The assaults are similar to Trump’s divisive “birther” discourse directed against President Obama. Trump has pushed the conspiracy theory for years, claiming that the country’s first Black president was not a “natural born” citizen as required by the Constitution, but rather was born in Kenya. This endeavor was a component of Trump’s ascent inside the most culturally conservative segment of the Republican Party before to his unexpected 2016 victory that took a large chunk of the American political establishment by surprise.

Trump’s most recent assaults, according to Haley, are evidence that she poses a danger to his candidacy for a third straight term.

When questioned about Trump’s erroneous claims that her ethnicity disqualifies her from the Oval Office, Haley told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday, “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks.” “What we know is that, if he’s throwing these temper tantrums and spending millions of dollars on TV, then he’s obviously insecure,” He is uneasy and aware that something is off.

On September 18, 2017, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley attended the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters.
The campaign of New Hampshire or bust for Nikki Haley, the presidential candidate, did not respond to a question about his remarks.

Ever since Trump won the Iowa caucuses on Monday, defeating second-place finisher Ron DeSantis by thirty points, Haley has attempted to frame the remainder of the GOP primary contest as a contest between herself and Trump, despite her close third-place performance. The goal of Haley’s campaign is to do better in New Hampshire in order to gain momentum in her home state of South Carolina, which will host the region’s first presidential primary the following month.

Trump, for his part, wavers between saying that the race for the nomination is practically finished and criticizing Haley as if the two are really in a close race. Although Trump continues to attack DeSantis, his other challenger, his favorite insults for the governor of Florida are “Ron DeSanctimonious” or “Ron DeSantis,” and they have nothing to do with race or ethnicity. DeSantis is Caucasian.

Trump’s attention on Haley’s name coincides with months of racial remarks and erroneous “birther” allegations being posted in far-right internet forums that often reference her given name. The left has also used Haley’s name and family history to talk about issues. She has been branded a hypocrite in several extensively shared social media postings for claiming that America was “never a racist country,” despite the fact that she most certainly encountered prejudice firsthand.

The Black pastor Darrell Scott, who spearheaded a diversity coalition during Trump’s past campaigns, backed the former president’s most recent criticism, calling it “slings and arrows” typical of election season.

“Politics must be examined as politics. It’s not personal,” Scott said. He has no desire to minimize or denigrate her in any kind. He’s just acting in that way to get support.

Scott justified Trump’s combative style by saying that it was a “goose-and-gander situation” for a public person who was “under attack for everything” and that he “has a compassionate side that most people don’t see.”

It is true that Trump’s language is effective in a Republican primary, according to Tara Setmayer, senior consultant to the Lincoln Project organization, which opposes him from inside the conservative movement. However, she added it does not justify his actions and that it is a devastating truth for the party.

Setmayer, who identifies as multiracial and describes herself as a former Republican and current conservative independent, said, “These are the rantings of an incredibly, almost pathetically insecure man who has demonstrated his racism and bigotry over his entire career.” Now that this degree of ethically dubious conduct has been permitted by an entire political party, why would anybody expect things to be any different?

Amidst the controversy on Friday, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lone Black Republican in the Senate and a previous presidential contender, endorsed Trump. Scott was appointed to the Senate by Haley in 2012, the year of her first governorship.

Trump has a lengthy history of using his race, ethnicity, and immigration background as weapons.

On September 18, 2017, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley attended the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters.
Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy… Indian Americans negotiate identity as they advance in US politics
He has been calling Obama “Barack Hussein Obama” for years, clearly emphasizing the 44th president’s middle name. Obama was born in America to a Black Kenyan father and a white American mother. Trump claimed for years that Obama had fabricated the tale and the birth certificate to prove it, even though he was born in Hawaii. Trump later acknowledged that his statements were untrue, but he said he was only doing it to “move on with the campaign” in the general election of 2016.

In a CNN interview in 2016, David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, urged Republican primary voters to support Trump. To which Trump said, “I know nothing about white supremacists, I know nothing about David Duke.”

Among the several Republicans who purposefully mispronounce the name of Vice President Kamala Harris is Trump. Trump sometimes pronounces “Ka-MAH-la” instead of the proper “KA’-ma-la.” Following Obama and Charles Curtis, the Native American-born vice president of Herbert Hoover, Harris is the first woman to hold the office of vice president and the third person of color to hold the office of president or vice president. She is of Indian and Jamaican origin.

Civil rights leader John Lewis, a Black congressman from Georgia at the time, said before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that he would not be attending because he thought Trump was an illegitimate president. In response, Trump denounced Lewis’s district in Atlanta, calling it “horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).” Among other things, the area is home to the Georgia Institute of Technology, downtown Atlanta, the international headquarters of Coca-Cola, and the main Olympic venues from 1996.

In a conference with lawmakers during his presidency, Trump questioned why the United States would welcome immigrants from Haiti and other “shithole countries” in Africa rather than nations like Norway. Although he did not specifically address race, the White House issued a statement after his remarks were made public, clarifying that Trump was in favor of allowing “those who can contribute to our society” to enter the country.

In addition, he disregarded the fact that all four of the congresswomen of color are citizens of the United States and that three of them were born here when he said that they need to return to their “broken and crime infested” home nations.

Mary Anne MacLeod, the mother of Trump, immigrated to the US in the years between the two World Wars. Frederick Trump, his paternal grandpa, immigrated to Germany in the 1880s as a Barvarian. Ivana Zelníčková, Trump’s first spouse before their marriage, was born in the modern-day Czech Republic. Melanija Knavs, the third wife of the former first lady Melania Trump, was born in what is now Slovenia. Accordingly, four of Trump’s five children are descended from immigrants.

The narrative of Haley’s family serves as evidence that the United States “is not a racist country.” Though she had ignored calls to have the Confederate battle flag removed early in her reign, she sometimes points to her part in removing it from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina after a racial slaughter in her state. Haley has also spent years navigating Trump’s fondness for using racial words.

In the 2016 primary campaign, Haley said, “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” after her endorsement of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio against Trump. “We do not want that as president; that is not a part of our party.”