Former South Carolina governor plans to run for president
American media are reporting that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is about to enter the race for the Republican presidential nomination. She is expected to make a public announcement on February 15. In 2021, Haley said she wouldn't run if Trump was in the race, but apparently something has changed. During a recent interview on Fox News, she said that the Republican Party, which has failed to win a majority of the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential campaigns, needs a new generation of leaders (apparently referring to herself, she is 51 years old).
Haley has already worked with Trump himself: from 2017 to 2018, she was the US Ambassador to the UN. When Trump relaunched his campaign with two rallies in New Hampshire and South Carolina, the latter was ignored by Haley herself and the state's federal senator, Tim Scott. On the one hand, it's right for her to start her campaign early and stake out a platform before heavyweights like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis enter the race. On the other hand, the more crowded the primaries, the easier it will be for Trump to prevail (as was the case in 2016).
Nikki Haley is the daughter of Indian migrants who set up shop in rural South Carolina, and she served as the state's governor from 2011 to 2017. In 2015, after a bloody mass shooting in an African-American church in Charleston (9 people were killed, including a local Democratic senator), which was carried out by neo-Nazi Dylann Roof, Haley signed a law to remove the rebel Confederate flag from the state legislative building .
Author: Yan Veselov
