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.
Like, who writes these titles? Surely anyone aware of Nixon’s war on drugs targeting hippies and black people, or Reagan ignoring the AIDS crisis, or any number of other examples would’ve made it clear that Republicans have been this way for decades, really since the southern strategy was enacted.
Right, that’s what the southern strategy was.
Get all the white voters on your side by stoking racial fears. Trump just realized that the racists are everywhere, and many of them were too dumb to understand the dog whistles enough to be motivated to vote. What some of the rest of us underestimated, was how little the rest of the conservatives would care.