(Washington) After carrying the voice of Donald Trump on the international stage for two years, Nikki Haley had become the final obstacle between the ex-president and the Republican nomination. But she is finally preparing to lay down her arms on Wednesday after an unequal duel.
Taking note of her heavy defeat Tuesday evening during Super Tuesday, which saw her rival knock her out in 14 of the 15 states at stake, she should announce in the morning that she is ending her campaign, several American media report.
At 52, this former governor of South Carolina, the new darling of the American right fed up with the antics of Donald Trump, will have played the style and generational change card to the fullest, sending the outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden back to back. , 81 years old, and his former boss, 77 years old.
Although far behind in almost all of the successive primaries since the start of the year, she prided herself on being much better placed than the former Republican president, with a deeply divisive personality, to win in November against to the Democratic candidate.
Throughout the campaign, Nikki Haley promises to restore a form of “normality” after the “chaos of Trump”, in a possible allusion to his multiple criminal charges, and does not miss an opportunity to mark her difference.
As in February, after her opponent left the stage and pretended to be surprised not to see her campaigning with her husband, Michael Haley, a National Guard officer serving in Djibouti: “He is deployed in service to our country, something you know nothing about,” she replied, saying that his “continual lack of respect for the sacrifices of military families” made him unworthy of the title of commander in chief.
Basically, she presents a very classic conservative argument, denouncing a federal state considered hypertrophied, a debt, taxes that are too heavy and an immigration system accused of laxity.
She advocates raising the retirement age for new entrants to the labor market in order to save the social security and health insurance systems from bankruptcy.
Divergences on foreign policy
Donald Trump repeatedly calls her a “globalist”, in opposition to his credo of “America first”. He accuses him pell-mell of wanting to “increase taxes, bleed Social Security” or even “open the borders”, without specifying on what basis.
In reality, their programs hardly differ, except on Ukraine, which Nikki Haley wants to continue to support massively in the face of the Russian invasion, while Donald Trump prides himself on being able to play mediator between Kyiv and Moscow.
After having long spared the one who appointed her in 2017 to the prestigious post of ambassador to the United Nations despite her lack of international experience, Nikki Haley is holding back less and less.
She accuses him of colluding with “dictators”, citing Russian leaders Vladimir Putin, Chinese Xi Jinping, and North Korean Kim Jong-un, by making short work of historic allies of the United States.
He himself has been calling her “sparrow brains” for months. He apparently does not forgive him for this crime of lèse-majesté of having gone back on his promise not to run against him if he was a candidate in 2024.
Born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, she is the daughter of a couple of Indian immigrants of Sikh religion.
She entered the political scene with her election in 2004 to the legislature of her native state of South Carolina, then rose to national prominence in 2010 during her campaign to become governor.
Once elected, Nikki Haley maintained the course to the right, displaying her hostility to unions and taxes, as well as to homosexual marriage, or by showing reluctance to welcome Syrian refugees in her state.
On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered a Charleston church and killed nine African-American worshipers. After refusing to do so for a long time, she then ordered the removal of the Confederate flag, a symbol of the state’s slavery past, from the South Carolina Parliament.