You knew it was coming.
As soon as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley emerged as the main threat to Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination, it became inevitable that she would be targeted by him. Any front-runner would do the same thing. But Trump did it with his typical touch.
Last week Trump reposted on his Truth Social account a conspiracy theory that Haley, who was born in South Carolina, was not qualified to be president because her parents, born in India, were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment establishes that any person born on American soil is a citizen of the United States and therefore can serve as president.
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By Friday the former president of the United States was referring to Haley as “Nimbra.”
There are two things to know in order to understand what’s unfolding. The first is that Haley’s given name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has gone by Nikki since she was a child—a local newspaper referred to her as Nikki when she was 12 years old and she had a role in a production of Li’l Abner; and she dropped her maiden name when she married Michael Haley in 1996.
Trump didn’t make anything. He scratched a scab which revealed a festering wound. All he did was give conservatives the chance to say, “ew, I’m not gonna let that define me,” while those who remained said, “I don’t trust medical science, that’s just a sign that we’re healing,” and those who jumped on the bandwagon said, “that’s never gonna heal properly, but if we help it get worse then we can do the medically sane thing and cut the limb off.” Finally, there are those last two in the scab camp who either say, whoa! That wound is insane, heheh! Let’s see how bad it can get," or those who say, “God wants this to rot because I’m hiding some naughty secrets. I hope we all die.”
Then there’s the rest of us who look at all of them and shout, “WHY ARE YOU VOTING FOR A FUCKING SCAB???”
Don’t forget the “how much money I can make selling band-aids?” crowd.