Trump Helpfully Reminds GOP Voters That Nikki Haley's Not Completely White
The guy's a racist, y'all.
You might’ve noticed that Donald Trump’s a gross racist. That’s his core competency. Back in 2011, Trump promoted the baseless “birther conspiracy” that claimed Barack Obama wasn’t actually born in the United States and was thus ineligible to serve as president. (Right-wingers had mistakenly assumed that Obama’s very Blackness was sufficiently disqualifying, so they were forced to start crafting bizarre theories about his birth certificate.)
It’s now 2024 and Trump is back at it, but his target isn’t Obama, who he’s grudgingly conceded is a US native, it’s his theoretical Republican primary rival Nikki Haley.
This week, Trump shared a screenshot from the far-right Gateway Pundit (no link!) that claimed Haley is ineligible to serve as president because “reports indicate that her parents were not US citizens at the time of her birth in 1972.” This is obviously nonsense: Haley was born and raised in South Carolina, which is definitely in the United States if not always the 21st Century. Her parentage isn’t relevant. That’s kind of the whole point of the American experiment, but racists like Trump resent birthright citizenship. He vowed to end it by executive order in 2018 but that went nowhere, because the 14th Amendment exists (for now), and he’s still campaigning on abolishing birthright citizenship on “day one” of his second reign of terror.
“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote in an email. “I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of color — and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”
I hate to “well duh” someone of Tribe’s standing but … “well, duh.” Trump isn’t playing a single “race card.” His entire deck has Klan faces. He’s a sick, vicious racist who wants to remind everyone that Haley is not white, even if she’s spent the past few weeks dressed in Scarlet O’Hara’s drapes. Trump has questioned the legitimacy of Ted Cruz (who’s illegitimate for reasons unrelated to his birth), Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and now Nikki Haley by broadcasting in the least subtle way imaginable that they have “foreign-born” parents (or just the one in Obama’s case). That Trump’s mother was born in the United Kingdom is of course irrelevant: It’s British America!
However, this isn’t just dirty politics from the Willie Horton/Swiftboat playbook. Trump’s repeated rejection of birthright citizenship is consistent with his white nationalist ideology. In GoodFellas, the mob would only let 100 percent pure Sicilians become “made men.” Trump probably doesn’t consider Haley white enough for true leadership in his criminal organization.
Trump’s obvious racism is obvious, but what’s important is how Republicans and the media respond to it. Republicans might desperately argue that whenever Trump complains that immigrants are “poisoning” (white) Americans’ blood, he’s just talking about all the fentanyl and when he refers to his political opponents as “vermin,” he’s … also talking about fentanyl, we guess.
The mainstream press will tepidly call out Trump’s bigotry in this specific moment but still refuse to permanently affix the label “RACIST” to him for now and forever. Apparently “Racist Insurrectionist Has Some Random Ideas About Inflation” is too contentious a headline, no matter how accurate.
Haley laughably claimed in 2020 that Trump had “worked to heal the racial divide.” She’s predictably silent now — despite leaping at the chance to attack any imagined racism from Democrats. She was swifter to respond to Don Lemon’s misogynistic blundering. She even sold beer koozies with the Fox News-tested slogan “Past My Prime? Hold My Beer.” You’d think she’d consider “Born In The USA” a slam dunk response, but she probably knows that once she starts having to prove herself, she’s already lost.
Note for the comments: Please no "clever" reminders that Nikki's name is also "Nimrata." We refer to people by the name they choose.
[NBC News]
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"Haley was born and raised in South Carolina, which is definitely in the United States if not always the 21st Century."
Once again, SER, you slay.
Rhetorical: Has anyone asked him to explain why he appointed someone UN Ambassador who isn’t even a citizen?