Trump mocks Nikki Haley's name in latest race-based attack

Side view of Donald Trump's head while he speaks.

By BILL BARROW

Associated Press

Published Jan. 19, 2024 Updated Jan. 20, 2024 4:22 PM PT

ATLANTA — Donald Trump used his social media platform to mock Nikki Haley’s birth name, the latest example of the former president keying on race and ethnicity to attack people of color, especially his political rivals.

In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as “Nimbra.” The former South Carolina governor and his administration’s ambassador to the United Nations was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa in Bamberg, S.C. She has always gone by her middle name, Nikki, and took her husband’s surname, Haley, when they married in 1996.

For the record:

4:22 p.m. Jan. 20, 2024An earlier version of this story said Kamala Harris is the second nonwhite U.S. president or vice president, following President Obama. She is the third person of color to reach one of the top offices, also following Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Nation, who was vice president under President Hoover.

Trump, who is the son and grandson of immigrants and has married two immigrants himself, called Haley “Nimbra” three times in the post on Friday and said she “doesn’t have what it takes.”

The attack came days before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, when Haley hopes to establish herself as the only viable alternative to Trump in the Republicans’ 2024 nominating contest.

Trump’s post was an escalation of recent attacks in which he referenced Haley’s given first name — though he’s misspelled it “Nimrada” — and falsely asserted she is ineligible for the presidency because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born in 1972.

The attacks echo the “birther” rhetoric against President Obama. Trump spent years pushing the false conspiracy theory that the nation’s first Black president was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, and was not a “natural born” U.S. citizen as required by the Constitution. That effort was part of Trump’s rise among cultural conservatives ahead of his 2016 election.

Haley has dismissed Trump’s latest attacks as proof that she threatens his bid for a third consecutive nomination.

“I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks,” Haley told reporters in New Hampshire when asked about Trump’s false assertions that her heritage disqualifies her from the Oval Office. “What we know is, look, he’s clearly insecure if he goes and does these temper tantrums, if he’s spending millions of dollars on TV. He’s insecure; he knows that something’s wrong.”

Trump’s campaign did not reply to an inquiry about his comments.

Since Monday’s Iowa caucuses — which Trump won by 30 points over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who placed second — Haley has aimed to portray the rest of the GOP primary battle as a two-way race between Trump and herself despite her narrow third-place finish. Her campaign is aiming for a stronger showing in New Hampshire, hoping for a springboard into her home state of South Carolina, which holds the South’s first presidential primary next month.

Trump is bouncing between declarations that the nominating fight is effectively already over and blasting Haley as if the two are locked in a tight contest. He still criticizes his other remaining rival, DeSantis, but his preferred pejoratives for the Florida governor, “Ron DeSanctimonious” or “Ron DeSanctus,” have nothing to do with race or ethnicity. DeSantis is white.

Trump’s focus on Haley’s name comes as far-right online forums have for months been littered with mentions of her given name alongside racist commentary and false “birther” claims. Haley’s name and family background also have become talking points on the left. Some widely circulating social media posts have called her a hypocrite for saying America was “never a racist country” when she likely experienced racism herself.

Pastor Darrell Scott, a Black man who has led a diversity coalition for Trump’s previous campaigns, defended the former president’s latest attacks as the “slings and arrows” that come with election season.

“You have to dissect politics as politics. It’s not personal,” Scott said. “He’s not intending to demean her or degrade her in any way. He’s just doing that to garner votes.”

Scott said Trump “has a compassionate side that most people don’t see,” and defended his aggressive approach as a “goose-and-gander situation” for a public figure constantly “under attack for everything.”

Tara Setmayer, senior advisor to the Lincoln Project group that opposes Trump from within the conservative movement, agreed that Trump’s rhetoric works in a Republican primary. But she said that’s a damning reality for the party and does not excuse his behavior.

“These are the rantings of an incredibly, almost pathetically insecure man who has demonstrated over his entire career his racism and bigotry,” said Setmayer, who is multiracial and calls herself a conservative independent and former Republican. “Why would anyone expect it to be any different now, when an entire political party has enabled this level of morally questionable behavior?”

Amid the fallout Friday, Trump won the endorsement of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate’s only Black Republican, whom Haley named to the seat as governor in 2012.

On Saturday, Haley highlighted a gaffe Trump made at the rally where Scott endorsed him: Trump repeatedly suggested Haley had been in charge of keeping the Capitol secure on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the building to try to stop his election loss to Joe Biden from being certified.

Haley was not at the Capitol that day. And Trump has consistently downplayed his administration’s failure to keep the Capitol safe and his delay in calling off the mob.

“They’re saying he got confused. That he was talking about something else — that he was talking about Nancy Pelosi,” Haley said. “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else where we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.”

Trump has a long history of using race, ethnicity and immigrant heritage as a cudgel.

For years, he has referred to Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama,” emphasizing the 44th president’s middle name. Obama was born in Hawaii to a white American mother and a Black father from Kenya, but Trump spent years falsely claiming that Obama had faked his background and his Hawaiian birth certificate.

Trump eventually admitted his claims about Obama were false, but during the 2016 general election said he had done so only to “get on with the campaign.”

When David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, encouraged Republican primary voters to back Trump in 2016, Trump responded in a CNN interview that he knew “nothing about David Duke” and “nothing about white supremacists.”

Trump is also among many Republicans who deliberately mispronounce Vice President Kamala Harris’ name. Rather than the correct “KA-ma-la,” Trump sometimes says, “Ka-MAH-la.” Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, is the first woman and second nonwhite person to become vice president.

Before Trump’s 2017 inauguration, civil rights icon John Lewis, then a congressman from Georgia, said he would not attend the inauguration because he considered Trump an illegitimate president. Trump reacted by blasting Lewis’ Atlanta-based district as being in “horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).” The district includes downtown Atlanta, Coca-Cola’s world headquarters, the Georgia Institute of Technology and principal sites of the 1996 Olympics.

As president, Trump asked in a meeting with lawmakers why the U.S. would accept immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” across Africa instead of countries like Norway. The White House followed the disclosure of his comments with a statement explaining that he supported granting access to “those who can contribute to our society.”

He also has said thatfour congresswomen ofcolor should go back to the “broken and crime infested” countries they came from, though all of the women are American citizens and three were born in the U.S.

Trump’s mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod in Scotland and came to the U.S. between the two world wars. His paternal grandfather, Frederick Trump, was a Bavarian-born immigrant who came from Germany in the 1880s. Trump’s late first wife, Ivana Zelnickova before their marriage, was born in what is now the Czech Republic. His third and current wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, was born Melanija Knavs in what is now Slovenia. That means four of Trump’s five children also are children of immigrants.

Haley frames her family’s story as proof that the U.S. “is not a racist country.” She sometimes highlights her role in taking down the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina statehouse grounds after a racist massacre in her state — though she had sidestepped requests to remove the banner earlier in her term. And Haley has for years navigated Trump’s penchant for racist rhetoric.

“I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” she said during the 2016 primary campaign, after she had endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over Trump. “That is not a part of our party; that is not who we want as president.”

Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.