As the Republican governor of South Carolina in 2015, Nikki Haley stood shoulder to shoulder with political leaders from across the state to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. Days before, an avowed white supremacist who posed with the flag in photographs massacred nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston.
As her state – and the nation – reeled from the heinous act, Haley argued that the flag embraced by many southerners as a symbol of “noble” traditions was for too many others “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past”.
It was a defining moment for the governor, one that earned her national attention and cemented her status as a Republican rising star. On Tuesday, Haley, 51, officially entered the race for president, becoming the first and so far only major Republican challenger to former president Donald Trump.
In an announcement video, Haley sought to capture some of that early optimism about her political future. “It’s time for a new generation of leadership,” she says.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley was born in the small town of Bamberg, South Carolina, and raised in the Sikh faith. “Not Black, not white, I was different,” says Haley, who later converted to Christianity.
From a young age, Haley was involved with her family’s clothing business, and began helping with the book-keeping at age 13. She began her political career in the state legislature as a small-government disciple who would eventually attract the support of the Tea Party movement. In 2010, she made history when she became the first governor of South Carolina who was neither white nor male. Four years later, she won re-election.
Making the case for her candidacy, Haley argued that she has excelled in the gauntlet of South Carolina politics. In a Fox News interview earlier this year, she bragged that she had “never lost a race”.
Haley is staunchly conservative. As governor, she refused to expand Medicaid and signed into law a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy that did not include exceptions for rape or incest. She also expanded concealed carry laws, despite calls for gun reform in the wake of the Charleston murders.
On her campaign website, Haley touts her role in pushing Trump to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal as well as her support for his decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Haley faced backlash and accusations of hypocrisy in 2019, four years after she ordered the Confederate flag to be taken down, for telling the conservative podcast host Glenn Beck that the Confederate battle flag represented “service and sacrifice and heritage” before it was “hijacked” by Dylann Roof, the Charleston gunman. In an op-ed, Haley argued that her views hadn’t changed and blamed the “outrage culture” for stoking the response.
The episode underscored the fine line Haley is attempting to walk as she charges into a competition already shaped by cultural fights over race and gender.
Though Haley has spoken about the discrimination she and her family faced as an immigrant family in the south, she rejects the notion that systemic racism exists in the US.
“Some look at our past as evidence that America’s founding principles are bad,” she says, as her announcement video shows imagery of racial justice protesters and news clips about the 1619 project. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
As she navigates the nascent Republican field, Haley is also contending with her past statements about the former president and her chief primary rival.
During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Haley strongly opposed Trump’s presidency, backing the Florida senator Marco Rubio instead. Tapped to deliver the Republican response to Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, she urged Americans to resist the “siren call of the angriest voices”, which many interpreted as an oblique criticism of Trump. (She later insisted that it was not.)
Yet Haley quickly overcame what she would describe as her initial “reservations” about Trump and endorsed him as the party’s nominee.
In 2017, she joined the Trump administration as ambassador to the United Nations. During her two-year tenure, she championed Trump’s isolationist foreign policy on the world stage. She notably led the effort to withdraw the US from the UN human rights council, calling it a “protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias”.
She also announced sanctions on Russia, drawing criticism from White House aides who said she had gotten ahead of the administration. Top economic adviser Larry Kudlow suggested that Haley had “momentary confusion” over the administration’s actions, to which she replied: “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.”
With All Due Respect became the title of her memoir, released after leaving the administration in 2018. Despite her unexpected departure, Haley is one of the rare officials to depart Trump’s administration on relatively good terms with the president.
Since then she has treaded carefully with her former boss, praising Trump’s record while offering some criticism that could help her appeal to more moderate conservative voters. “We should embrace the successes of the Trump presidency and recognize the need to attract more support,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year.
In the wake of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Haley condemned Trump’s actions and said he would be “judged harshly by history”. But then she worked to return to his good graces and opposed his impeachment over his role in the Capitol assault.
Haley previously pledged she would not run if Trump was a candidate. But Trump said recently that Haley informed him that she was considering running and he encouraged her to do it.
His eagerness may reflect polling that shows Trump’s odds of winning the nomination rise in a splintered field of more Republican candidates. Nearly a year before primary voting begins, most early polls show Haley drawing between 1% and 3%, far behind Trump and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. Though much could change, her standing has prompted some speculation that she may be auditioning for another role, perhaps as a running mate to the Republican nominee.
South Carolina has traditionally played an early and decisive role in choosing the parties’ presidential nominees – and this year loyalties among the state’s prominent Republicans are divided.
As governor, Haley appointed Tim Scott to replace the retiring South Carolina senator Jim DeMint in 2013. Scott, the Senate’s only current Black Republican, won a special election a year later and is now weighing a presidential bid of his own.
The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who praised Haley as a compassionate changemaker in an entry naming her one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2016, has already thrown his weight behind Trump.
But Haley exuded confidence in her announcement video on Tuesday, declaring that she was prepared to take on the US’s foreign adversaries – and perhaps her own political ones as well.
“They all think we can be bullied, kicked around,” Haley says in the video. “You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
