Republican Nikki Haley announced her candidacy for the 2024 US presidential election on Tuesday, becoming the first notable candidate to challenge Donald Trump. “I’m a presidential candidate,” the former US ambassador to the UN said in a video to her supporters.
Nikki Haley, 51, had been expected for several weeks to announce her candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. She had promised a “special announcement” on Wednesday to her supporters in Charleston, South Carolina, the state of which she was governor.
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First notable candidate to challenge Donald Trump
At the UN, she tirelessly defended America’s interests. Daughter of immigrants, known for her outspokenness, Republican Nikki Haley, 51, now hopes to govern it. She becomes the first notable candidate to challenge Donald Trump.
Abroad, the name of this dynamic and ambitious curator is intimately associated with that of the former president, whose spokesperson she was for two years. Upon her arrival at the UN in January 2017, this political leader, then without international experience, clashed with her hard-hitting formulas on explosive subjects.
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“You don’t put lipstick on a pig,” she says of the Iranian nuclear deal, which she will fight firmly, even if it means bullying some of the United States’ closest European allies in passing. Some of her partners hail the “pragmatism” of this direct and warm woman. But for others, she is too “ideological” and “disconnected from reality” in her approaches.
Contrary to much of his camp
A spokesperson for Donald Trump’s foreign policy for two years, Nikki Haley will take care to keep the leader at a safe distance despite everything. As during the debates in 2018 around the appointment of conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, accused of sexual assault: contrary to a large part of his camp, she calls to listen to his alleged victims.
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Since the end of Donald Trump’s term, the attacks have become much more frontal, with Nikki Haley openly criticizing the president’s post-election crusade over supposed fraud that has never been proven. “It’s time to appoint a Republican who can govern and win a national election,” she told Fox News recently.
In her press release announcing her candidacy, she inserted this warning: against bullies, if you are tackled and kick back, “it hurts them more with high heels”.
confederate flag
Born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, this 50-year-old is the daughter of a couple of Indian immigrants of the Sikh religion. She entered the political scene in 2004 when she was elected to the South Carolina legislature and gained national prominence six years later during her campaign to become governor.
After her election, she maintained her course on the right, displaying her hostility to unions and taxes, as well as to homosexual marriage, or by being reluctant to welcome Syrian refugees in her state. On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered a church in Charleston and killed nine African-American worshipers in this state bordered by the Atlantic. She then finally orders the removal of the Confederate flag, considered a symbol of racism by many, from the state parliament, a gesture perceived as unifying.
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A mother of two, Nikki Haley is married to a National Guard officer formerly deployed to Afghanistan.