Terry Holyfield hailed Haley's Confederate flag removal efforts at a North Charleston gathering. Holyfield called it “the right thing to do at that time, and I applaud her for standing by her beliefs.” Holyfield indicated she supported her favorite Civil War cause option.
“She answered that question intelligently and correctly,” Holyfield added. "Our government and Constitution were different, and she answered that question perfectly." Candidates of color for high office have always been pressured to discuss race, especially before white audiences.
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian and the only Black Republican in the Senate, regularly spoke to all-white Iowa groups on personal responsibility and how "we don't have Black poverty or white poverty" during his presidential campaign last year. Poverty exists.” Hindu entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy was regularly asked by Iowa Christians if they worshipped the same God. Ramaswamy and Scott have embraced Trump and left the nomination race.
Haley occasionally links her upbringing to politics, saying her mother condemns illegal border crossers since she emigrated legitimately. Trump has also criticized Haley's ethnicity. Recently, Trump nicknamed Haley “Nimbra” on social media. That appeared to be a deliberate misspelling of Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Since childhood, Haley has used “Nikki,” her middle name.
Trump also encouraged phony conspiracy theories about whether Haley could run for president as the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants. Her South Carolina birth makes her a natural-born citizen, one of three presidential criteria. This erroneous assertion recalls Trump's “birther” rhetoric concerning Barack Obama, the first Black president.
Haley has called Trump “desperate to stop our momentum,” using whatever means to attack his opponents, when reporters have asked if his comments of her are racist. “He does that when threatened. Haley stated in a CNN town hall that Trump's phony claim that she was ineligible for president was his behavior when he feels uncomfortable. “I know I'm dangerous. I understand why he's doing it.
“We live in the best country in the world, but we have a long way to go to fix all our little kinks. However, I believe our Founding Fathers had the best of intentions when they started, and we fixed it along the way,” Haley said as she struggled to make her point during a CNN town hall last month in New Hampshire, where host Jake Tapper asked her if America had “never been a racist country.”
Tapper claimed “America was founded institutionally on many racist precepts, including slavery.” Haley said that “all men are created equal,” but she added that “the intent was everybody was going to be created equally.” Haley has chronicled childhood prejudice in her autobiographies and public appearances, including bullying, school insults about her race, and being rejected from a beauty competition for being neither white nor Black. Her father, a Black university professor, was racially profiled at a farmer's market.
“This habit of finding the similarities and avoiding the differences became very natural to me over time,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir. Haley told an Indian television program about her origins and prejudice in 2014. In response to whether she needed to “disown” her origins to work in American politics, Haley stated her heritage defined her.
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