Nikki Haley is running for president, making her the first Republican to challenge Donald Trump for the GOP nomination. What’s the former UN ambassador’s pitch to voters? According to a campaign ad released on Tuesday, she’s got a few. Her first: that it’s time for a “new generation of leadership,” starting, of course, with her. Second: That as the child of Indian immigrants, she can confidently say racism is not a problem in America. And last: that she doesn‘t want to hear any liberals complaining about this country, which is practically perfect, if you compare it to places that commit genocide and throw babies into fires.
On the racism point, Haley tells viewers that critics “look at our past as evidence that America’s founding principles”—which involved categorizing Black people as three fifths of a person—“are bad.” But according to the would-be president, “Nothing could be further from the truth.… Even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America. I was born and raised in South Carolina. So I have seen the very best of our country.” Interestingly, she does not mention the massacre that occurred in South Carolina just a few years before she was born, wherein highway patrolmen opened fire on approximately 200 unarmed Black students protesting racial segregation; or the 1995 burning of a Black church by members of the Ku Klux Klan; or the 164 lynchings that occurred in the state between Reconstruction and World War II; or the present-day racial gerrymandering. Probably only because she had to, as she was governor at the time, Haley does refer to the 2015 mass shooting in which a white nationalist shot and killed nine Black people during a bible study class at a Charleston church. However, she only does so by way of vague platitudes, saying: “When evil did come, we turned away from fear, toward God and the values that still make our country the freest and the greatest in the world,” she says. “We must turn in that direction again.” (She does not mention that, just weeks after the shooting, she signed a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds; it’s not clear why that moment didn’t make it into the ad, but there’s a good chance it’s because it would conflict with her claim about America’s sterling founding and past. She also does not mention the racial profiling of her father that she witnessed at a child, including an incident in which a pair of police officers appeared at a produce stand, and, per The New York Times, “watched him until he paid.” While explaining her decision to back the removal of the flag, she said, in 2015: “That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.”)
Meanwhile, in an apparent attempt to both showcase her time at the UN and to box the libs into a corner, Haley declares: “I have seen evil. In China, they commit genocide. In Iran, they murder their own people for challenging the government. And when a woman tells you about watching soldiers throw her baby into a fire, it puts things in perspective.” Obviously, all of the aforementioned is unspeakably awful, and no one is disputing that. But Haley seems to believe that if your country isn’t committing genocide, you really have nothing to complain about. (Note: She coincidentally does not touch on the epidemic of mass shootings in the U.S. that her party won’t do anything about, or the routine police killings of Black people, or any of the other things that occur in America that are perfectly reasonable to criticize without someone basically responding, “Go live in Iran and see how much you like it.”)
Haley ends her ad—which naturally includes a line about Joe Biden’s record being “abysmal” and the “socialist left” wanting to “rewrite history”—by telling her audience: “I don’t put up with bullies, and when you kick back it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.” The bully line might have been a reference to China and Russia, who Haley suugests want to exploit our “vulnerability,” but it could also be a shot at her her former boss, Donald Trump—though as of Tuesday afternoon, he couldn’t even be bothered to comment on her candidacy. Which may or may not have something to do with the fact that he’s actually very happy about it. A recent poll showed Haley sinking a Ron DeSantis bid—which has not yet been announced—and handing Trump the GOP nomination.
