The 2024 hopeful can’t decide who she wants to be—the leader of a post-Trump GOP or a “friend” to the president who tried to sabotage democracy.
By TIM ALBERTA, POLITICO
KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. – Late last year, Nikki Haley had a friend who was going through a hard time. He had lost his job and was being evicted from his house. He was getting bad advice from bad people who were filling his head with self-destructive fantasies. He seemed to be losing touch with reality. Out of concern, Haley called the man. “I want to make sure you’re okay,” she told him. “You’re my president, but you’re also my friend.”
I. Whiplash
II. The Outsider
III. A Time for Choosing
I. Whiplash
At the time of Haley’s call, Donald Trump—her “friend”—had spent much of the previous month refusing to concede defeat in an election he clearly lost, opting instead to delegitimize the institutions of government that upheld the result, indulge in outlandish conspiracy theories and generally subvert the country’s 244-year-old democratic norms. Republican leaders who possessed the credibility to dispute these claims publicly and exert a counterinfluence over the GOP electorate had chosen not to. Haley was among those who kept quiet.
For the previous four years, since being plucked from the governorship of South Carolina to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Haley had navigated the Trump era with a singular shrewdness, messaging and maneuvering in ways that kept her in solid standing both with the GOP donor class as well as with the president and his base. She maintained a direct line to Trump, keeping private her candid criticisms of him, while publicly striking an air of detached deference. Upon her resignation in 2018, the New York Times editorial page praised Haley as “that rarest of Trump appointees: one who can exit the administration with her dignity largely intact.”
Haley told me about this phone call in the second week of December. We sat in the shadow of a twinkling 15-foot Christmas fir inside the parlor of the Kiawah Island Club, an exclusive lair nestled between two golf courses and the Atlantic Ocean where she has lived since returning to private life. I had come to talk with Haley about her future; about how the antics of the outgoing president might complicate her plans to pursue that very office in 2024. Knowing that she did not believe Trump’s conspiracy theories, I asked Haley whether she had attempted to persuade the president that he was wrong—that the election wasn’t rigged, that he had lost legitimately.
“No,” she replied. “When he was talking about that, I didn’t address it.”
Since January 20, 2017, the Republican Party has become defined by its unwillingness to confront—and, in many cases, its willingness to enable—an out-of-control president. Here was Haley, someone with a reputation for speaking candidly to Trump, someone who had the courage as governor to remove the Confederate flag from her state capitol, admitting that she hadn’t bothered to challenge him—even in private—on a deception that threatened the stability of American life. Why not?
“I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told me. “This is not him making it up.”
But Trump was making it up. To date, there had been no discovery of material voting fraud. The president’s legal team had lost 55 court cases and won just one. All 50 states had certified their results and sent a single slate of electors to the Electoral College. Despite all this—despite that politically, legally and constitutionally, it was game over—Trump was inciting threats against judges and elections officials and urging Americans to take matters into their own hands.
She countered that one case remained—a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general, endorsed by more than 100 Republican members of Congress, seeking to invalidate tens of millions of votes in battleground states—and it must be heard before Trump stands down. “This is coming to the end,” she said. “Up until now, he has not been able to prove it in court. So, if this continues to go down that path, Biden will be president. He knows that.”
Never mind that the Texas lawsuit was a publicity stunt; never mind that, hours after our conversation, it was shot down by Trump’s own appointees to the Supreme Court. What was more striking was Haley’s underlying position: that because Trump believed he had been robbed, he was therefore justified in saying and doing whatever he pleased.
“You have the president of the United States telling everyone that he was cheated, that the voting systems are corrupt, that we’re living in a banana republic where the deep state has rigged this election against him,” I told her. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“He believes it,” she smiled.
Haley clearly wasn’t prepared to have this conversation. Like so many Republicans, she had expected Trump would either eke out a second term, putting a date-certain on the end of his presidency, or lose so lopsidedly that his career would be toast. Instead, he split the difference, losing by less than one percentage point in each of three decisive states, a result that sent him spiraling into delirium. The resulting paralysis could be seen across the GOP, but Haley was a special case. She knew she could not afford to antagonize the president. But her rationalizations for his behavior were so strained that they called into question her own judgment. This was a test for Haley, an early opportunity to define herself on a question of great national urgency. And she was failing.
“There’s nothing that you’re ever going to do that’s going to make him feel like he legitimately lost the election,” Haley said. “He’s got a big bully pulpit. He should be responsible with it.”
“Is he being responsible with it?” I asked.
“He believes it,” she replied.
Haley would only allow that Trump’s lawyers had “done a disservice to him.” But there was no accountability for his actions. When I pressed her—why couldn’t she answer the basic question of whether the president was acting responsibly?—Haley cut me off, pointing out the window toward an emerald-tinted putting green.
Top: Rudy Giuliani points to a map as he speaks to the press about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election. Bottom: President Donald Trump, left, and President-elect Joe Biden, right, in November 2020. | Getty Images and AP Photo
“That would be like you saying that grass is blue and you genuinely believing it. Is it irresponsible that you’re colorblind and you truly believe that?” she said.
“But he swore an oath,” I said, incredulous at her analogy. “This is the president.”
“He believes he’s following that oath,” she shot back. “This would be different if he was being deceptive.”
But what about the president broadcasting a loop of lies that had been thoroughly debunked? Isn’t that being deceptive?
“He deserves the truth. Is he hearing the truth?” Haley told me. “I don’t think certain people around him are telling him the truth.”
Haley had that part right. The president was surrounded by grifters and yes-men of the worst sort. But what about Haley? She was supposed to have more self-respect than a Mark Meadows or a Rudy Giuliani or a Michael Flynn. Why didn’t she tell Trump the truth?
She never offered an explanation for this. What she did offer was reassurance, in the face of my alarm about where all of this might be headed, that everything would be fine. Her friend wasn’t going to do anything crazy.
“If this case falls through,” Haley said, referencing the Texas lawsuit, “He’s going to go on his way.”
She had that part wrong. A few weeks later, Trump stood before a crowd of thousands of MAGA supporters and urged them to march on the Capitol: “We must stop the steal…”
Haley attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House in June, 2017. | AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
‘SHE LOSES HERSELF IN THE MOMENT’
Walking out of the White House in the fall of 2018, Haley thought the worst was behind her.
No more briefings on presidential tweets. No more knife-fighting with administration officials. No more worrying that Trump would torpedo her career. Settling back into her beloved South Carolina after a 22-month stint in New York, equipped with a big boat and a luxury home and $200,000 speaking gigs galore, Haley counted her winnings. Joining the Trump administration had been a massive gamble, and she hit the jackpot—not merely emerging unscathed from a gauntlet that maimed many of her contemporaries, but looking all the smarter and sturdier for it. She had gained rare foreign policy experience, nailed the role of adult in the room and raised her visibility in front of donors and voters alike. Her political future wasn’t just intact; it was brighter than ever before.
But there is no expiration date on a Faustian bargain. Haley knew from the moment she agreed to work for Trump, a man whose character she had lampooned mercilessly during his run for president, that she would never be rid of him. She knew that the scars of her own life story—from watching her immigrant family ridiculed, to being called a “raghead” by a fellow state lawmaker, to burying nine Black parishioners who were slaughtered by a white supremacist inside their Charleston church—were perpetually at risk of being ripped open by the president she allied herself with.
“Haley is in the same position as all these other Republicans who jumped on the Trump Train,” said Chip Felkel, a longtime South Carolina GOP strategist. “Some of this shit, you can never get clean from it. People will remember.”
Since last fall, I’ve spent nearly six hours talking with Haley on-the-record. I’ve also spoken with nearly 70 people who know her: friends, associates, donors, staffers, former colleagues. From those conversations, two things are clear. First, Nikki Haley is going to run for president in 2024. Second, she doesn’t know which Nikki Haley will be on the ballot. Will it be the Haley who has proven so adaptive and so canny that she might accommodate herself to the dark realities of a Trump-dominated party? Will it be the Haley who is combative and confrontational and had a history of giving no quarter to xenophobes? Or will it be the Haley who refuses to choose between these characters, believing she can be everything to everyone?
President Trump speaks to the media during a meeting with outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley in the Oval Office, Oct. 9, 2018. | AP Photo/Evan Vucci
A person with no pedigree, no connections, no fancy resumé, doesn’t travel from family accountant to United Nations ambassador in the span of 12 years without prodigious talents. Haley has them. She is unusually bright. She has an acute sense of timing that has allowed her to often (if not always) make her own luck. She is a natural storyteller—someone for whom the best answer is always a riveting anecdote—and has a gift for reading every room, always knowing what people want to hear. She has a warmth and common touch that camouflage her ruthless competitive streak.
But she also has liabilities. What I’ve heard again and again is that Haley’s raw skills obscure an absence of core beliefs and a lack of tactical thinking. I’ve also heard—and witnessed—how her laid-back southern persona conceals a pugnacious impulsive streak. Her unplanned outbursts and bridge-burning decisions are legend in South Carolina where she built a reputation for demanding loyalty but rarely giving it, leaving the road behind her littered with enemies as well as allies.
“Nikki is motivated by instinct, and a lot of times when she’s out on the stump, or in a certain environment, and she feels like saying something, that emotion takes over and she loses herself in the moment,” says Rob Godfrey, who spent six years as Haley’s chief spokesman and no longer works for her. “She can be a tremendous messenger, because of her natural talent. But she doesn’t take well to a lot of coaching.”
This is particularly relevant when it comes to Haley’s relationship with Trump. Her distaste for the man is no secret. But neither is her goal of becoming president. For the past five years, she has struck a delicate balance, and she had done so better than other members of her party. Her vicious criticisms of Trump never came back to bite her, nor did her public silence in the face of his manifest abuses.
But the era of having it both ways is over.
Everything Haley says is being scrutinized by those who have come to question her authenticity—including but not limited to Republican officials, Democratic officials, the primetime lineup at Fox News, the mainstream media and a certain former president of the United States. This much has been impressed upon Haley in recent months: Trump is one person she cannot afford to cast aside. It’s why she wore a dismissive smile as I interrogated her in mid-December, demonstrating unblinking loyalty to a man who was orchestrating a slow-motion mutiny against the U.S. government.
Still, even in those moments, I sensed her posture was unsustainable. Haley might not have a sculpted worldview; she may not have immovable convictions. But she does have an apparent humanity about her. She isn’t indifferent to the suffering imparted by Trump and ignored by so many Republicans. The daughter of dark-skinned immigrants, Haley has often talked of needing to validate their trust in this country; to prove to them that “coming to America was the best decision they ever made.” Having conquered the bigoted world of South Carolina politics, she once felt emboldened to speak her truth about Trump’s racism, about the menace of white supremacy, about the demons that must be exorcised from the Republican Party. But since joining the administration, Haley has dialed back such moralizing, even when it’s been difficult to do so. This is her constant tension, a tug-of-war between conscience and calculation.
Many of Haley’s associates have long predicted this tension would inevitably lead to a sharp break with her former boss. The unanswered question always was: Once the break happens—and once the backlash comes for her—how would Haley respond? Would she dig in, decide to run a harder, more uncomfortable campaign that aligns with her beliefs about Trump and the party? Or would she pull back, spooked by the ferocity of the far right, and choose to conform in the name of bettering her odds at the presidency?
President Trump speaks to supporters at a rally near the White House, Jan. 6, the day of the Capitol riot. | Yuri Gripas/Sipa USA via AP
January 6 offered the beginnings of an answer.
Three and a half weeks after our discussion at the Kiawah Island Club, insurrectionists scaled the walls of the U.S. Capitol building, laid siege to the House and Senate chambers and hunted for top government officials to assassinate. The president barely lifted a finger to stop the rampage, and by then it was too late. Five Americans died, including Brian Sicknick, a Capitol police officer.
Flying down to Florida the next day, for a much-anticipated keynote speech to the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, Haley had a decision to make. She could continue to straddle the realms of the MAGA insurgency and the GOP establishment, couching a mild rebuke of Trump in a broader call for unity, doing just enough to satisfy the graybeards without alienating the redhats. Or she could go with her gut.
“President Trump has not always chosen the right words. He was wrong with his words in Charlottesville, and I told him so at the time,” Haley told the RNC crowd, a ballroom stuffed with Trump supporters. “He was badly wrong with his words yesterday.”
Then, she added: “And it wasn’t just his words. His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.”
HALEY ON REPUBLICAN SUPPORTERS OF TRUMP
“I talked to this woman this morning, and she said, 'You know that the people that stormed the Capitol, there were a lot of Antifa. And what they did was if they took their MAGA hat and turned it backwards, that was their signal that they were Antifa.' This was an educated, smart, longtime Republican woman. … We’ve got a lot of work to do. They've been lied to by everybody.”
To the skeptic, it might appear that Haley had done what was politically expedient, throwing Trump under the bus to curry favor with party elites. “She did it her own way in South Carolina, and it worked, because she was authentic. If she becomes contrived and consultant-driven, it’s not going to work,” said Kellyanne Conway, who served as Trump’s White House counselor and remains a top adviser to former vice president Mike Pence. “I’m surprised that somebody who took down the old boys network to become governor thinks she needs the old boys network to become president.”
Make no mistake: Haley does want to be president. She told me no final decision has been made. But she has secured commitments from top party strategists, including pollster Jon Lerner and consulant Nick Ayers, men with a plan for making her America’s first woman president. She has used a non-profit to travel and raise funds, and recently launched a political action committee to turbocharge her activity. She has built a stump speech that’s an extension of her Trump-era tightrope routine. Though a formal launch is still two years off, Haley’s stealth campaign for the presidency has been underway for some time.
And yet, if Haley had simply wanted some separation from the president, she could have done it with less risk. She could have rebuked his conduct on January 6 alone, the way other Republican leaders had. Haley went well beyond that. In so doing, she instantaneously severed ties with Trump and his loyalists, forsaking her slow-and-steady theory of unifying the Republican Party.
This was encouraging—and deeply vexing. Haley told RNC members what they didn’t want to hear. Yet it took an invasion of the U.S. Capitol for her to speak a truth that she knew all along—a truth many Republicans knew all along, a truth that might have saved lives and kept the country from enduring a horrible ordeal.
Comparing her remarks to the RNC, versus those she made to me just weeks earlier, it was clear that two distinct versions of Haley were on a collision course. A few days later, I jumped on a flight to South Carolina and braced for impact.
National Guard members and U.S. Capitol Police protect the Capitol on Feb. 08, 2021. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
‘I’M DISGUSTED BY IT’
“Idon’t talk a lot about the Charleston tragedy, from a very personal level,” Haley said quietly, by way of explanation.
It was a gloomy Tuesday, January 12, and we were back on Kiawah Island, back in that same elegant country club. This time the room was darker. The Christmas tree was gone and so was the smile on Haley’s lips.
“But when Charlottesville happened, I was very triggered,” she said, recalling the fatal 2017 rally of white supremacists and the president’s coddling of them. “I know that bad things can happen. And I called [Trump] and I said, ‘You need to realize your words matter and what you say, and you think you’re saying, and what someone else may hear can be very different things. You have to understand that people can take that and hurt people with it.’
“He said, ‘Nikki, Nikki. This isn’t Charleston, this isn’t Charleston,’” Haley recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not saying this is Charleston. I’m saying that I know that certain people hear your words and will react to that and you have to be careful with that.’”
She took a breath. “Fast forward, I’m watching the television the morning of the 6th and I see Don Junior get up there,” she said, reciting the president’s son’s calls to action against Republican leaders, closing her eyes as if reimagining the scene. “And then I hear the president get up there and go off on Pence. I literally was so triggered, I had to turn it off. I mean, Jon [Lerner] texted me something and I said, ‘I can’t. I can’t watch it. I can’t watch it,’ because I felt the same thing. Somebody is going to hear that, and bad things will happen.”
I asked Haley whether she has spoken to Trump since January 6. She shook her head.
“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley hissed, leaning forward as she spoke. “Mike has been nothing but loyal to that man. He’s been nothing but a good friend of that man. … I am so disappointed in the fact that [despite] the loyalty and friendship he had with Mike Pence, that he would do that to him. Like, I’m disgusted by it.”
At that moment an article of impeachment was being drafted in Congress. There was even pressure for Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Haley rolled her eyes. “I think it’s a waste of time. And I think impeachment is a waste of time.”
Top and bottom left: Violent protesters storm the Capitol, Jan. 6, during the Congressional certification of the electoral vote. Bottom right: The hearse carrying the remains of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died as a result of injuries he sustained during the Jan. 6 attack, drives past police officers saluting after a funeral ceremony at the Capitol, Feb. 3. | AP Photo and Getty Images
So, I asked, how should the president be held accountable?
“I think he’s going to find himself further and further isolated,” Haley said. “I think his business is suffering at this point. I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have. I think he’s lost his social media, which meant the world to him. I mean, I think he’s lost the things that really could have kept him moving.”
I reminded her that Trump has been left for dead before; that the base always rallied behind him. I also reminded her that the argument for impeachment—and conviction—is that he would be barred from holding federal office again.
“He’s not going to run for federal office again,” Haley said.
But what if he does? Or at least, what if he spends the next four years threatening to? Can the Republican Party heal with Trump in the picture?
“I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”
This was the most certainty I’d heard from any Republican in the aftermath of January 6. And Haley wasn’t done.
“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” she said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”
But do rank-and-file Republicans feel the same way? I told Haley about recent polling shared with me, showing his approval ratings in deep red districts hadn’t flinched.
“Listen, when I walked in that RNC room, I was not expecting a whole bunch of love from that speech,” she said. “I know how much people love Donald Trump. I know it. I feel it. Whether it’s an RNC room or social media or talking to donors, I can tell you that the love they have for him is still very strong. That’s not going to just fall to the wayside.”
She added: “Nor do I think the Republican Party is going to go back to the way it was before Donald Trump. I don’t think it should. I think what we need to do is take the good that he built, leave the bad that he did, and get back to a place where we can be a good, valuable, effective party. But at the same time, it’s bigger than the party. I hope our country can come together and figure out how we pull this back.”
But how can America “come together” without anyone taking responsibility for the events spanning November 4 to January 6, I asked Haley. Did she regret not talking Trump down when she had the chance? Did she regret not speaking out publicly? Did she regret laughing off my questions about how dangerous this campaign of mass deception might prove to be?
“At the time, I didn’t think that was dangerous,” Haley said. “I didn’t think that there was anything to fear about him. There was nothing to fear about him when I worked for him. I mean, he may have been brash. He may have been blunt. But he was someone who cared about the country. … I still stand by that. I don’t think we should ever apologize for the policies that we fought for and the things that we did during his four years. Since the election—” she stopped herself. “I mean, I’m deeply disturbed by what’s happened to him.”
Haley repeated these sentiments over the course of a two-hour conversation: “Never did I think he would spiral out like this. … I don’t feel like I know who he is anymore. … The person that I worked with is not the person that I have watched since the election.”
Was Haley really surprised that Trump, who spent the previous four years inventing claims of mass voter fraud, would try to destabilize the democratic process? If the answer is yes, as she insists, it raises a fundamental question about her discernment. If she so badly misread Trump—a man whose habits and methods she had ample opportunity to study up close—then how can she be trusted to handle the likes of Vladimir Putin?
Haley bristled at the question. “What I’ll tell you is you can look at my leadership from the very first second I got into that statehouse to the second that I was governor to everything I did there at the U.N. My leadership stands on its own grounds. … I’m not going to apologize,” she said. “That’s not poor leadership. That’s sitting there looking at someone knowing the relationship that you had, knowing the good that he had, and watching someone fall apart, in awe, going, ‘How did this happen?’”
Listening to Haley, it occurred to me that one day soon, people could be watching her fall apart. They might ask the same question: “How did this happen?”
If that day comes, the answer will rest on a simple truth: She is still trying to have it both ways. To argue that Trump only spent two months pummeling our institutional norms—instead of four years—is to refuse admitting any culpability for the party, and the country, going off the rails. But to state that millions of people followed him into a dead-end of social and political violence is to acknowledge that something is very wrong—something that was wrong before January 6, and something that was wrong before 2016.
At the heart of this contradiction is a showdown between who she wants to be and who she thinks she needs to be. Nikki Haley’s fundamental conflict is not with Donald Trump. It’s with Nikki Haley.
II. The Outsider
Ajit Singh Randhawa and Raj Kaur Randhawa were an ideal match. Both hailed from the Punjab region of India. Both were Sikh. Ajit earned a master’s degree in biology, while Raj was the rare Indian woman to complete law school. The newlyweds moved to Vancouver in the 1960s so he could pursue a Ph.D. Upon graduation, Ajit found a teaching position at Voorhees College, a small, historically Black school in Denmark, South Carolina. Raj was not sold on moving to America. Nevertheless, the Randhawas touched down in Columbia, the state’s diminutive capital city, in 1969, and settled into Bamberg, population 2,500, where they rented a small home on the landlord’s condition they would not entertain Black guests.
Bamberg had long been evenly split between Black and white families, but none of the lifelong residents I met there recalled ever seeing a brown person before the Randhawas came to town. Fitting in was not possible. Raj wore her traditional sari and a bindi on her forehead; Ajit sported a turban everywhere he went. By the time Nimrata Nikki Randhawa arrived in 1972—yes, “Nikki” is on her birth certificate— some of the shock had worn off locally.
Nikki Haley as an infant. | Handout
“There were all these whispers, all these rumors, because of the turban and whatnot,” remembered Cindy Kilgus, a white woman in her sixties, who befriended the Randhawas. “It took some people a while. But once they got over that”—she paused—“newness, everyone came to love them. They became a big part of this community.”
HALEY ON HER CHILDHOOD
“It was kind of isolating, because while my friends were all getting to eat spaghetti and cheeseburgers, I was having to eat Indian food again with my mom.”
There were growing pains. Haley told me she cannot recall a time in which she wasn’t aware of being different. She is still animated by the stories of her childhood. How teachers made her play Pocahontas in the Thanksgiving pageant. How her Black and white classmates asked her to choose which racial team she would play kickball for. How she was disqualified from the Little Miss Bamberg pageant because there were only awards for a white winner and a Black winner. (This last tale, which has become central to family folklore, was disputed by locals I spoke with. “To this day, the ladies who ran the pageant still say that never happened,” said Nancy Foster, the mayor of Bamberg and a longtime acquaintance of the Haley family.)
Her most vivid memory is of driving to Columbia as a little girl with her father and stopping at a roadside fruit stand. As he bagged produce, the fidgety owners eyeing his turban, Haley saw one of them pick up a phone, and within minutes two police cars came zooming up. “My dad didn’t say a single word going home. He was hoping I didn’t notice. But I hurt for him,” she recalled. “Whether it was that, or whether it was us walking through a grocery store and people staring and pointing, hearing them make fun of him or what my mom was wearing, or when the country club opened up and they invited everybody, or we went to the picnic and nobody would sit with us—” she paused. “I remember that pain.”
A young Nikki Haley, right, attends “International Fest” in Bamberg. | Handout
The Randhawa family’s fortunes changed when Raj quit her job teaching sixth graders and opened a small clothing store, Exotica. Over time, her handmade formal gowns became so popular with local ladies—the word spreading from Bamberg to surrounding towns—that Raj bought a small storefront off Main Highway 301. It was a stunning success, both commercially and culturally. Ajit and Raj began organizing an annual “International Fest,” a Bamberg-wide event featuring music and cuisine from around the world. Slowly, the Randhawas were transformed from suspect outsiders into civic pillars.
“Their store put Bamberg on the map,” said Brian Glover, 62, who was born and raised there. “Some of the big Black gospel singers of those days, they used to come here just to buy their dresses. Shirley Caesar used to come here. To Bamberg! She had shows all over the south, and she would come to Exotica to buy her dresses. That became a real point of pride around here.”
Ajit and Raj had found financial success, enough to send Nikki to a nearby private school, Orangeburg Prep (home of the Indians, as luck would have it). But she headed straight home each day, using her math skills to take over Exotica’s books at age 13. Haley soaked her teenage angst in the sounds of her musical idol, Joan Jett, dreaming of a day when she might be unleashed on the world.
Nikki Haley, on her father’s knee, pictured with her parents and three siblings in the late 1970s. | Handout
“Her parents were very strict. She wasn’t allowed to do a lot of things socially. I think that always made her feel different,” says Heather Cockrell, who befriended Haley on her first day at Orangeburg Prep, and wound up working alongside her stocking shelves at Exotica. “I know there were other kids who made her feel different, and she was constantly aware of that. But she didn’t want to draw attention to it, either. She would always try to be self-deprecating; that was her way of making people feel comfortable.”
Finally escaping home and enrolling at Clemson University, the young accounting major felt liberated. She had led a life of rules and labels. Now she was in a seat of self-determination. Friends remember her charming her way into a waitressing job and negotiating down the rent with a notoriously stingy landlord. They remember her fighting a years-long battle with her parents over a boyfriend, Bill Haley. They also remember her deciding that Bill should go by his middle name, Michael, and her future husband agreeing. “Nikki was very, very stubborn,” Carie Mager, her college roommate, told me. “If she decided something had to be a certain way, you weren’t going to change her mind.”
But there were also fits of doubt. Politics had never been a subject of discussion in the Randhawa family; to this day, she claims to have no idea whom her parents would have voted for. The late ’80s and early ’90s, her college years, were a time of disruption and transition, with Americans gripped by everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the first Gulf War. Haley would host spaghetti dinners for classmates, facilitating conversations on current events. What was notable, friends recall, was Haley’s reluctance to attach herself to any position. She was conservative, at least culturally, but kept her distance from the furies of campus politics. Nobody knew if Haley voted, much less whom she voted for.
A sign honoring Nikki Haley welcomes visitors to Bamberg, South Carolina. | Tim Alberta
“Let me put it this way,” chuckled Mikee Johnson, a prominent Republican businessman in South Carolina, who was the student body president at Orangeburg Prep and ran with the same group of friends in their college years. “If you’d asked me back then, of the 100 people in her class, who might run for office one day, I would have put her in the bottom 10.”
In the decade after college, Haley did nothing to change that perception. She got married, had two kids, worked in accounting for a Charlotte recycling firm and finally returned home to handle the finances of the family store. Exotica had swelled into a million-dollar business with a new location in Lexington, an up-and-coming suburb of Columbia.
But some familiar problems resurfaced. Haley felt cloistered and impatient. She was eager for an outlet to channel her restlessness. What she found was politics.
Then-State Representative Nikki Haley speaks to a Tea Party group in April 2009. | Photo by Tim Dominick
‘IT WOULD NOT BE AN EASY ROAD’
First at the local chamber of commerce, and later, within a group of female small business owners, Haley discovered something: People liked her. They listened to her. She had a certain magnetism. What she lacked was political experience—or even a party affiliation. By Haley’s account, she had an epiphany, realizing she was a Republican because of her beliefs in business and individual responsibility. But for a striver in Lexington County, becoming a Democrat was never an option. Her associates urged a run for the school board in 2004. Haley had other plans.
“She came to see me before running for state representative, to see what I thought, but she seemed to have already made up her mind,” recalled Rita Allison, a former GOP lawmaker who had previously run for lieutenant governor.
The story underscores how Haley has consistently downplayed the narrative of her searing ambition. Haley has often described how it was Allison who suggested running for the House seat; Haley claims she didn’t know who currently held it, or whether she lived in that district. But according to Allison—who likes Haley and hopes she becomes president—that is not true.
“Obviously, she had done her research. She knew what district she lived in. She knew who she’d be running against,” Allison told me. “I found her to be very strong-willed, because she knew that he had served many years in the South Carolina house, and I warned her that it would not be an easy road to travel.”
Indeed, Haley was taking on Larry Koon, the longest-serving legislator in Columbia. He had hinted he might retire after 30 years in the statehouse, which was enough to draw another candidate into the race, but then promptly pulled back. It would be a three-way contest for the GOP nomination. Haley was taking on Koon as well as David Perry, a well-known businessman.
The decision shocked Haley’s parents. She embraced the pressure that came with their eyebrows-raised reaction, believing that a victory would, in some way, validate their hardships in America. “I felt like I owed it to my parents,” Haley told me. “I wanted to do it to show them they made the right decision; to show them that things had gotten better.”
For months, she spent every weekday morning camped at the entrance to local subdivisions, coffee and donuts in hand, passing out literature and chatting up locals. On weekends, she knocked doors. Some were put off by her aggressive approach, and her “not-from-around-here qualities,” as Walter Whetsell, a GOP consultant who ran Perry’s primary campaign, told me. Her message was tailored accordingly: “This is no disrespect to Mr. Koon,” Haley assured voters. “This is about the fact that we have way too many lawyers at the state House, and I think you need one really good accountant.”
While she spoke in broad conservative strokes—about getting government out of the way, about running Columbia like a business—she was no firebrand. Press clippings reveal a candidate focused on boosting education budgets and investing in rural communities. Unlike other aspiring Republicans, Haley refused to sign the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” a document that bound lawmakers never to raise taxes for any reason. “I see that as giving a blanket answer,” Haley told the Columbia State newspaper. “No one wants to see taxes raised, but I think that it would be closed-minded to sign a pledge.”
Haley shocked local politicos by capturing 40 percent of the vote, keeping Koon under the 50 percent needed to win the primary outright. What ensued was ugly: During the two-week runoff election, Koon’s campaign published ads referring to her as “Nimrata N. Randhawa,” and distributed mailers showing her alongside her father in his turban. Smear campaigns spread rapidly online. Some messages mocked her eastern-world roots; others explicitly accused her of being a Muslim radical. This wasn’t yet three years removed from the attacks of September 11; Haley’s legislative district was deeply conservative, dominated by fundamentalist Christians and more than 90 percent white.
Larry Koon, right, talks to his opponent Nikki Haley, left, at the Lake Murray Precinct on the morning of their run-off election. | Brett Flashnick/The State
An unlikely hero in Haley’s story is Joe Wilson, a congressman who would later gain infamy for shouting “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during his address to a joint session of Congress. Wilson, who chaired the India Caucus on Capitol Hill, had kept a close eye on the campaign in Lexington County, pledging neutrality. But when the racist ads hit, Wilson drove to Exotica and introduced himself to the Randhawa family. He took a picture with the candidate and her parents—decked out in their finest Punjabi garb—and authorized her to disseminate it from her campaign.
The people advising Haley were nervous about the photo—and drawing undue attention to her family. But she wouldn’t hear it. This wasn’t just a matter of sticking up for her parents, Haley told them. It was good politics.
“By that point, Nikki had already met every single voter who got those mailers. They all knew her. They all had talked to her,” says Katon Dawson, who was then chairman of the state Republican Party. “It made a lot of those people angry on her behalf.”
Haley won the runoff by 10 points. But finding acceptance in Columbia wouldn’t come easy.
Haley proved to be popular among her fellow freshmen and was voted her class president. But to the incumbents in Columbia, particularly on the Republican side, she was an outsider—and a threat. “I’m telling you, nobody liked her. Nobody wanted to work with her. They hated her,” state Rep. Nathan Ballentine, who entered the legislature with Haley and became her closest friend, told me. “And it’s weird, because she was such a normal person. She wasn’t very political at that point; she was just sort of happy to be there and trying to make friends. But she was different. And the good old boys wanted to remind her she was different.”
This manifested itself in especially cruel ways. Haley, who converted to Christianity and joined a Methodist church with Michael, remained open about her continued visits to the Sikh temple with her family. Some of her Republican colleagues would try to provoke her with jokes about alien gods; others would force uncomfortable discussions about religion. It became a running joke for Jake Knotts, a veteran GOP lawmaker, to ask Haley to deliver a prayer before the party’s luncheons.
“Everybody knew she wasn’t a real Christian. Everyone knew she converted for political purposes,” Knotts, who is now retired, told me. “Her whole career has been stair-climbing, and becoming a Methodist was just one of those stairs.”
HALEY ON CONFRONTING SEXISM
“I’ve always been the only one of something. The only one. There’s never been a line to the women’s bathroom in any of the jobs that I did.”
It’s worth noting that this is not a minority view in South Carolina; unfounded rumors about her religion aside, Haley is viewed by many political insiders as someone willing to do whatever necessary to advance. If so, her advance was somewhat halting, owing to a reliance on instinct over ideology. Haley faced considerable backlash for sponsoring a 2007 bill mandating HPV vaccines for minors without any provision for parental opt-out, the sort of big-government program no conservative politician would support unless her political antennae was broken.
In a sense, Haley was shaped not by any particular cause or dogma, but by the disrespect she encountered inside the GOP caucus. Rejected by her colleagues, Haley stopped listening to conventional wisdom and started rebeling against the Republican leadership. “I don’t need to be that person that everyone likes,” she remembers thinking. “I don’t need to be that person that gets along with everybody.”
Maybe she wouldn’t have become an outsider, I suggested, if her colleagues had accepted her.
“I think that’s probably very true,” she replied.
This is the best window into Haley’s formative political period. She came to be loathed by many of her fellow Republicans for not being a team player; for going rogue on certain votes and procedures that made them look slimy or stupid to her benefit. But it was their exclusion of her in the first place that set Haley down this path of torturing the establishment, of tapping into the sentiments of the Tea Party, and ultimately, of allying herself with Governor Mark Sanford.
South Carolina’s governorship is among the nation’s weakest, a legacy that dates to antebellum concerns that a Black man might one day be elected to the state’s highest office and would need constraining by white legislators. (They certainly didn’t foresee a brown woman burying the Confederate flag.) Many governors have treated the position as almost ceremonial in nature. Sanford did not. A quirky intellectual with a libertarian streak, Sanford spent his two terms at war with the statehouse, demanding less spending, and members of his own party regularly defied him. Haley was one of the few lawmakers to stand with Sanford, even when it came to some of his more indefensible positions, such as turning down money from Obama’s stimulus package in 2009.
“I do think she agreed with some of what Sanford believed in. But she was also at war with the party, just like he was,” says Luke Byars, the former executive director of the state GOP. “That was what came to typify her political philosophy. She seemed to enjoy fighting her own party.”
Haley’s biggest victory came after a bloody internal campaign to force lawmakers to cast every vote on-the-record. This struck many of her colleagues as symbolic showboating. It certainly was that—but it was also a master stroke of populism. Haley traversed the state, riling up constituents with stories of their elected officials avoiding accountability. It cost Haley a coveted committee seat. But it won her the affection of Sanford.
Uninspired by the field of Republicans running to replace him, Sanford spent the spring of 2009 talking with his team, led by pollster and chief adviser Jon Lerner, about how a governor’s legacy hinges on the election of a like-minded successor. Then, one day, Sanford surprised everyone. He said he’d just met with Haley—who was then angling for state treasurer—and urged her to run for governor instead.
He asked Lerner to commission a poll, and they scheduled a meeting one week later with Haley and her husband at the governor’s mansion. When they gathered, Lerner said there was bad news: Haley was identified by just 6 percent of likely voters, and her ballot share was 3 percent. There was a silver lining: None of the other GOP contenders were particularly well-liked, despite being well-known. Still, there was no apparent path for Haley; her only hope was the support of a polarizing and mercurial governor.
Sanford put in writing the steps he would take to elect Haley—ad appearances, fundraisers, public events. Her friends urged her to play the long game and run for treasurer. But Haley couldn’t help herself.
General election candidates for South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (R), right, and Vincent Sheheen (D), left, debate at the Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg, Oct. 19, 2010. | AP Photo/Patrick Collard
‘I’LL NEVER GET OVER IT’
In June 2009, the month after Haley stunned Republicans in the state by declaring her candidacy for governor, Mark Sanford disappeared on his infamous hike down the “Appalachian Trail.” When the news broke that Sanford had in fact gone to Argentina to visit his mistress, it seemed to sound a death knell for Haley’s infant campaign. All of the people who had helped her up to that point were working for rival campaigns; just three of her House colleagues endorsed her.
“She was not taken seriously. There were like ten of us who thought she could win,” recalled Matt Moore, a longtime friend of Haley’s whom she later installed as state party chairman. “When Sanford went down, her fundraising completely dried up, and we all thought it was over. I mean, people were calling for her to drop out, and I remember her being near tears. She wondered aloud if it was worth staying in.”
A turning point for Haley came in August, when she attended a candidate training seminar on the west coast and met Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Aware of her predicament, the presidential scion advised Haley to embrace being an underdog. If she ran a grassroots campaign, he told her, meeting with as many voters and groups as possible, she could sneak up on the field. Inspired, the longshot candidate started touching every corner of the state, ferried from stop to stop by Tim Pearson, one of Sanford’s ex-staffers, in a Toyota 4-Runner, talking to rooms of 10 or 12 people at a time. The campaign had no real fundraising apparatus, so Haley brought a wicker basket, all but begging for donations.
Her Republican rivals thought it all rather pathetic. But it seemed to be working. When Lerner polled the race at Christmas time, he was pleasantly surprised to see Haley’s name identification had jumped to 18 percent from 6 percent back in May. She still trailed far behind the other three candidates—Congressman Gresham Barrett, Attorney General Henry McMaster and Lieutenant Governor André Bauer—but there was cause for hope in the Haley campaign.
Barrett, considered the favorite in the race, knew Haley was attacking his right flank. But his team didn’t take her seriously. “Here’s what the focus groups tell us—she’s smart, she’s talented, she gets results and she’s conservative,” Whit Ayres, the pollster to Barrett’s campaign, briefed the high command at the beginning of 2010. “If she ever starts to raise money, we’re screwed.”
Top: South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley looks on as Jeb Bush answers a question during a March 2015 tour through the state just months after announcing that he is actively exploring a presidential run in 2016. Bottom: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, left, as well as former Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, right, campaign with Nikki Haley, in 2012 and 2010, respectively. | Getty Images and AP Photo
To raise money—real money—Haley needed to get in front of more people. Fortunately, that January, she stole the show during an MSNBC-hosted primary debate, savaging Barrett over his vote for the bank bailouts in 2008. The other thing she needed was big-name endorsements. Haley’s campaign worked two targets in particular: Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. The pair of former governors spoke to different constituencies, but both were known to back an underdog.
Haley was busy reeling in a big fish at home. Sanford had refused to resign after his extramarital scandal, making him persona non grata in the race. Privately, however, Haley knew he was sitting on a fortune in campaign cash. Every week, Haley would pay a visit to Sanford’s office, sitting on his couch and describing the financial woes killing her campaign. Every week, Sanford would listen politely, then explain that a massive cash infusion was not part of his written agreement with her. But eventually, Sanford wore down. It wasn’t just Haley’s persistence; several of their mutual associates, including Lerner and Tom Davis, the governor’s chief of staff, argued she was within striking distance and Sanford could put her over the top, making up for the harm he’d done to her candidacy.
HALEY ON DEALING WITH RACISM IN SOUTH CAROLINA POLITICS
“In the governor’s race, I remember my dad would go stand in the back of the room because he didn’t want anybody to see him. Because he was scared it was going to hurt me. And that was the reason why I started every speech saying, ‘I’m the proud daughter of Indian immigrants.’”
“I agreed to spend about $400,000 on her behalf, and she only had raised $400,000 in her whole campaign,” Sanford recalls. “I didn’t feel good about giving her that much. But my world was shattered at that point. They talked me into it.” (Sanford adds: “And then she cut me off. This is systematic with Nikki: She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”)
Haley’s campaign took off. Romney delivered his endorsement right around the time Sanford was writing his check. Erick Erickson, the popular conservative blogger, hosted a “moneybomb” fundraiser that made Haley a celebrity on the right. On Tax Day, she headlined a Tea Party rally at the state capitol; Sanford’s affiliated group shot footage and launched their massive ad campaign. Haley then blitzed local television stations with her own buy, foregoing introductory niceties and savaging her three opponents as weak-kneed pawns of the establishment.
Palin provided the finishing touch. For months, Nick Ayers, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association, had lobbied the former vice presidential nominee for an endorsement. She finally swooped into the state less than a month before the June 8 primary, throwing her weight behind Haley at a rally that saturated statewide media coverage. The race was all but over. “It was like watching a NASCAR driver come screaming from way behind and passing everyone else,” says Dawson, the former state party chairman. “I had never seen anything like it.”
But for Haley, no road worth traveling has been without potholes. In late May, just weeks before the primary, a political blogger who’d done some work for Haley in the statehouse made an explosive allegation: He claimed to have carried on a romantic relationship with her during that time. The following week, a prominent Columbia lobbyist—a paid fundraiser for the Bauer campaign—alleged he and Haley had a one-night stand. And then, days before the primary, Knotts, the senator who had tortured Haley in the legislature, gained national attention for calling her “a raghead” on an internet broadcast.
“When they couldn’t defeat me on the merits, that’s what they did,” Haley told me, angrily denying the affair allegations. “And they literally paid money to have that happen. And it’s something that, I mean, I’ll never get over it.”
To be clear: There has never been any evidence to substantiate the extramarital rumors. (Although some people in Columbia still peddle them unsolicited.) Nor was it ever proven that Haley’s opponents were funding the allegations, though Haley will go to her grave believing that senior officials on both the Bauer and Barrett campaigns played a role.
Nikki Haley celebrates her primary victory for the Republican nomination to be South Carolina Governor at the State Museum on June 22, 2010, in Columbia. Haley defeated Rep. Gresham Barrett in a runoff election. | Chris Keane/Getty Images
What is indisputable is that the entire scandal helped Haley. Voters proved mostly sympathetic to the lone female candidate, who looked to be the victim of a clumsily coordinated attack by her male rivals. Meanwhile, a storehouse of opposition research on Haley that had been collected—legitimate demerits that might have actually hurt her campaign—was rendered useless by the feeding frenzy surrounding the affair allegations.
“We had all this bad shit on her—all these fines from the IRS, all these red flags from her accounting work, all these shady payouts she was taking as a consultant while working in the legislature—and we were going to beat her with it during the runoff,” says Terry Sullivan, a longtime GOP consultant and South Carolina native who helped lead Barrett’s campaign. “But that all went to waste. It was impossible to get that information out, because the media was obsessed with a sex scandal. The race was over at that point. So, she’s entitled to believe whatever she wants to believe, but it makes no sense. Why would we sabotage our own strategy?”
For much of election night, she teetered just past 49 percent, appearing at several points to have the votes necessary to hit 50 percent and avoid the runoff altogether. When she fell just short, Haley disappeared into a woman’s room at the restaurant hosting her party and refused to come out. Only after her mother went in and delivered some tough love did her daughter give a quick speech. Two weeks later, Haley thumped Barrett by 30 points, and there could finally be a real celebration.
It came with a hiccup. Haley, who was soon to make history as the country’s first female Indian-American governor, booked the State Museum in Columbia for her party. But the only place the advance team could erect a stage was directly beneath a sign that read ‘Confederate Relic Room.’ Haley wouldn’t stand for it. Her team assembled a banner of red, white and blue balloons and covered up the sign.
Gov. Mark Sanford, center left, and Gov.-elect Nikki Haley, center right, make their way down the steps of the South Carolina Statehouse during Haley's inauguration ceremony in Columbia, S.C., Jan. 12, 2011. | AP Photo/Brett Flashnick
‘SHE WILL CUT YOU TO PIECES’
Haley’s honeymoon period was nonexistent.
This was largely because of how she limped into office. Not only did Democrat Vincent Sheheen outhustle Haley on the trail, he ran with all the opposition research her GOP rivals had collected. As the salacious headlines faded, Haley, the accountant and good-government advocate, was confronted with a string of bruising stories—about a messy trail of tax liens and IRS penalties, about a sweetheart six-figure job from a foundation she had backed in the legislature, about a falsified application she submitted to land that job. Sheheen hammered the issue of Haley’s trustworthiness, tying her to Sanford with ads that asked, “Can we afford another governor who says one thing and does another?” In the end, Haley beat Sheheen by 4 points, an embarrassingly narrow margin given the Republican wave nationwide.
All of this only made Haley angrier—and prompted her to take actions that confirmed her skeptics’ worst suspicions. The new governor purged from state boards numerous members with varying degrees of attachment to the “establishment,” a catch-all for anyone who’d supported her rivals in the GOP primary, replacing them with friends and campaign donors. (This included the baffling ouster of state party chairwoman Karen Floyd, who had helped Haley survive the general election, from the powerful port authority board.) She doubled down on Sanford’s approach to the legislature, publishing “report cards” for the public to see how members voted with respect to her priorities. She tried to bully the statehouse with a special session, only to be sued in the state Supreme Court and lose. Meanwhile, Republicans launched an ethics probe alleging she had broken lobbying laws while serving in the House. (The charges were later dropped.) Haley warred with the local media, embracing Palin’s martyrdom routine.
Consumed with retribution, she set about destroying the lobbying practice of the man who’d alleged the one-night stand. She spearheaded an effort to defeat Knotts in his 2012 campaign. (Around the time he lost, a white supremacist murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, an event that reinforced to Haley the need to purge her party of hate-mongers.) In one episode that became lore in Columbia, Haley invited the newly elected chair of the South Carolina GOP, Chad Connelly, to the governor’s mansion for breakfast. She then spent two hours excoriating him for his friendships with strategists from the Barrett and Bauer campaigns, warning Connelly that she would be watching his every move.
“Listen, man. She will cut you to pieces,” says Dawson, the former party chairman and unofficial dean of the state GOP. “Nikki Haley has a memory. She has a memory. She will remember who was with her and who was against her. And she won’t give a second chance to anyone who she thinks did her wrong.”
Haley had once been nicknamed “Mark Sanford in a dress.” But around this time, a modified phrase became popular in Columbia: “Bill Clinton in a skirt.” This wasn’t meant solely as an insult. In addition to her vengeful streak, and her slippery side, everyone could see Haley’s immense political gifts. “In my lifetime in politics, the only person I’ve seen that I can compare her to is Bill Clinton,” says Senator Tom Davis, who was Sanford’s chief of staff as governor. “She has that same charisma, that same pulse on people, that same force of personality.” Mick Mulvaney, the future White House chief of staff who served with Haley in the statehouse, and had his share of run-ins with her over the years, told me Haley perfected the “Clinton model” of icing perceived enemies. “She may be the most ambitious person I’ve ever met. And that’s okay,” Mulvaney said. “I’m just surprised she’s felt it necessary to burn bridges with so many people for no apparent reason.”
Gov. Nikki Haley speaks during a town hall meeting in Aiken, S.C., March 15, 2011. | Anna Dolianitis/The Aiken Standard via AP
Haley has acknowledged her putrid opening act in the governor’s office. She has also said that writing her memoir in 2012 allowed her to vent and move forward. Her friends snicker at this rationalization—Haley’s list of enemies hasn’t faded one bit, they say—but there is no question she corrected course. With her approval among Republicans scraping 60 percent, the governor began to build relationships with local media. She dialed back the inflammatory Facebook posts and started wooing lawmakers. She sought out advice from an old adviser, Jeb Bush, on tackling education reform. She appointed congressman Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate, making him the first Black senator from the south since Reconstruction. (Haley, who felt threatened by Scott’s popularity inside the GOP, didn’t contact him for nine days after the seat became vacant; she then invited him to dinner and asked if they could announce his appointment the next morning. “It was zero to 60 at the speed of a Tesla,” Scott recalled.)
Perhaps most important, she abandoned her many smaller fights to focus on the great task before her: luring industry to South Carolina. It was in this role, as chief salesperson for her state, that Haley truly excelled. Her cutthroat pursuit of international business, hopping on flights to Europe with hours’ notice to make a personal pitch to some board or CEO, endeared her to longtime adversaries in Columbia. When Haley left the governorship, 400,000 more people were employed in South Carolina than when she took office. This period of economic boom concealed many of the warts of her tenure—and highlighted yet another successful rebranding of Haley. “The truth is, Sanford was very ideological, always worried about the budget and taking these unpopular stands,” said Byars, the longtime GOP consultant and friend of Haley’s. “Nikki tried that, and it didn’t work. So, she wanted to be a jobs governor.”
Some took a more cynical view. “Nikki is willing to do whatever she needs to do and be whoever she needs to be,” said Lee Bright, a longtime archconservative in the statehouse. He earned an “A+” on Haley’s inaugural report cards and received her endorsement when he ran for Senate in 2012, but the two had an ugly falling out during her governorship. He added, “The fact is, she doesn’t have a core. Adapting to the electorate is what keeps you around in politics, and she’s done it more effectively than anyone I’ve ever seen. She went from being an enemy of the establishment to being the face of the establishment.”
Bright cited sharp disagreements with Haley on spending, subsidies and accepting federal funds, issues on which she contradicted her past positions. (The governor wound up signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a document she criticized early in her career.) But her greatest apostasy, in his eyes, was the defining act of Haley’s career.
III. A Time for Choosing
On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist walked into the historic Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston and sat with a group of Black worshippers who invited him to join their Bible study. He then executed nine of them, including the church’s pastor, state Senator Clementa Pinckney. Alerted to the news of a mass shooting at the church, Haley immediately called Pinckney, whom she believed was in Columbia for the legislative session. A short time later, she learned why he hadn’t picked up.
It became clear almost instantaneously that South Carolina was in for another nasty fight over the Confederate Flag. Haley was not, at first, keen on tackling a controversy that had cost one of her predecessors his job. But when photos surfaced of the assassin posing with a Confederate flag and boasting of his efforts to start a race war, Haley decided—without input from a single adviser, colleague or friend—the flag needed to go.
The governor couldn’t afford to inflame tensions. Nor did she want to appear opportunistic for doing what was obviously the right thing. “If I had come out and said, ‘The flag is hatred. It’s racist. Shame on you for wanting to keep it up’—yeah, it would have made me look like a superstar, but it wouldn’t have done a service for the people that I was trying to serve,” Haley told me. “I had to be respectful in the way I communicated with them. I had to not be a threat. I had to do it in a way so that they were making the decision, not me.”
HALEY ON THE CONFEDERATE FLAG
“I lived my life trying not to judge people because I know what it’s like to be judged. So, if you want me to go say that certain people are bad, I’m not going to do it. Because there are some of my friends who still do respect the Confederate flag. And there are some of my friends who think it’s a horrible thing. I’m not going to pick any of those friends over the others.”
But it was Haley’s decision—and it wasn’t a comfortable one. For all the flowery talk of how far South Carolina had come, with an Indian-American governor and a Black senator, the truth is that both Haley and Tim Scott knew they were expected to toe the line on behalf of their very white, very conservative base. But she also knew that history was calling upon her. For whatever her modulations on policy issues, this was a tragedy striking at the heart of who Haley had always been, an outsider in a hostile environment, the brown girl in Bamberg who never felt like she belonged.
Acting on the raw instincts that had always animated her, Haley called in every favor she had, enlisting allies from Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The governor orchestrated a swarming pressure campaign to force the legislature to vote to permanently remove the Confederate Flag from the state capitol grounds.
“I was in the room when she hauled legislators in, to make her final appeal on the flag, and it was one of the most extraordinary moments I’d ever witnessed in my life,” recalled Matt Moore, who was then the state GOP chairman. “People somehow think now that it was fait accompli to bring that flag down, but all the way up until that moment, I thought the vote was going to fail. The House leadership told Nikki that their members didn’t want to go through with it. And Nikki put all of her political capital on the line. She leaned on them hard. She told them, ‘If you vote for this and get attacked for it, I will come to your district and campaign for you personally.’”
According to several lawmakers who pledged their support to Haley, what persuaded them finally was listening to her story of the police and the highway fruit stand. The pain she felt as a little girl, she told them, should never be inflicted on any Black child driving past the capitol of their state.
“I think the Nikki Haley we all know as governor and ambassador—it was out of misery and challenges that she became triumphant,” Scott told me. “And she shepherded our state through its misery with a graciousness and a gentleness that you don’t see in public servants.”
Memorials for the nine victims of the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as well as a protest against the Confederate flag take place on the grounds of the State House in June and July, 2015 in Columbia, South Carolina. | Getty Images and AP Photo
“She will never get the credit she deserves for leading that charge,” Davis, the state senator, said. “In retrospect, some people think it was easy, but it was the hardest fight I had ever seen. That flag would have never come down without Nikki Haley.”
To the cynic, watching Haley’s national reputation soar in the summer of 2015, it was proof of her cunning: She had manipulated a tragedy for political gain. “She never had a problem with the flag, but all of a sudden after the shooting, she has some reminiscence of being a child and being mistreated?” Bright grumbled. “It’s all political with her.”
The truth was just the opposite. After years of casting about, searching for her identity and her purpose in a party that was antagonistic to people like her, Haley had found it. Republicans were overdue for a reckoning on race, and she was ready to arrange it.
Haley had dabbled in these debates before. When running for governor, she started every speech by declaring, “I am the proud daughter of Indian parents who reminded us every day how blessed we are to live in this country,” a preemptive way to neutralize whispers about everything from her faith to her dad’s turban. In early 2013, after appointing Scott to the U.S. Senate, Haley scoffed at the national party’s failure to reach minority voters. “The Republican Party has always been very good at saying, ‘We include everyone,’ but they’ve never taken time to show it,” Haley told me at the time. “When have they ever gone to a minority community and said, ‘What do you care about? We’re a better country because you’re in it.’”
Gov. Nikki Haley looks on with other lawmakers as the coffin of church pastor and South Carolina State Sen. Clementa Pinckney is carried to the Statehouse Rotunda on June 24, 2015, in Columbia. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
And yet, Haley had been smart enough and sufficiently self-aware to not push much harder. She intuitively understood that Republicans weren’t ready to have those hard conversations. Haley believed that had changed after Charleston, because Charleston had changed her. Friends told me how she lost a dangerous amount of weight in the weeks following the shooting as she blitzed the legislature over the flag, visited with affected families and quietly attended all nine funerals. Haley’s career to that point had been marked by moments of inauthenticity, but this was not one of them. Everyone around her could see that something was permanently altered in her political DNA.
“I had always been amazed at her ability to handle whatever came her way,” said Carie Mager, who served as a bridesmaid in Haley’s wedding. “But the Charleston shooting nearly broke her.”
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio arrives with Gov. Nikki Haley at an event in Chapin, South Carolina, Feb. 17, 2016. | Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images
‘WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO TO THIS WOMAN?’
It is through this prism that the following year of Haley’s life should be understood. Watching the ascent of Donald Trump, whose candidacy was fueled by the ostracizing of Mexicans, Muslims and outsiders of every sort, Haley felt personally offended. She also felt obligated to act. Asked to give the Republican response to Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address, Haley raised eyebrows by needling the GOP frontrunner. “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” Haley told the nation. “We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.”
Haley had been pleased with the diverse, talented slate of Republican candidates—led by her old friend, Jeb Bush—and was confident that one of them would be able to slay the dragon of Trump. By the time of her nationally televised speech in January 2016, however, Haley had lost any such confidence. Trump was bullying his way to the GOP nomination. Watching him finish a close second in Iowa, then annihilate the field in New Hampshire, Haley knew that the third primary contest, in her South Carolina, represented a last stand.
Her endorsement was both highly coveted and highly unlikely. Republicans universally expected that Haley would remain neutral out of respect for an old friend. Because Bush’s campaign was on life support, there was no reason for Haley to throw away her political capital endorsing him. Bush understood that. But he also knew Haley shared his disgust with Trump: Over a long dinner at the governor’s mansion, days after the New Hampshire primary, the two aired their grievances about the reality show candidate. Bush was the most unglued Haley had ever seen him, flailing his arms, red in the face, visibly degraded.
Bush would have been all the angrier had he known Haley had other dinner guests planned.
HALEY ON ADVERSITY
“Every challenge that I’ve ever gone through—every person that’s ever stabbed me in the back, every feeling of being isolated—all of those made me who I am and made me better.”
Secretly, in the days after the New Hampshire primary, Haley’s team reached out to both the Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio camps. Each candidate was invited to have dinner with the governor and bring their spouse and one staffer. Haley didn’t really know Cruz, but he was everything she had expected—awkward, insincere. Over a painfully long dinner, the Texas senator recited line after line from his stump speech. When she asked Cruz, near the end of the dinner, what he would want his legacy to be as president, he responded, “I want to be remembered as the president who repealed every word of Obamacare.” When the senator left, Haley and her staff burst into laughter.
Haley wasn’t acquainted with Rubio, either. What she did know, she didn’t like: The guys leading the Florida senator’s campaign, including manager Terry Sullivan, had run Barrett’s race against her in 2010. (Haley’s political consigliere, Jon Lerner, made it clear when he extended the invitation that Rubio should not bring Sullivan to the dinner.) When Rubio and his wife arrived at the governor’s mansion, they were asked into a reception area for refreshments. Except Rubio didn’t show up. For the next 10 minutes, as the senator’s wife made small talk with Haley and her husband, the candidate himself was nowhere to be found. As it turned out, he was still in the foyer, yakking it up with Haley’s butler about sports and other topics. When the folks in the reception area caught wind of what was holding Rubio up, Haley’s staffers worried she might be offended. But she was positively charmed.
Haley and Rubio bonded like long lost relatives. Over the course of several hours, they compared notes on experiences in their respective state legislatures. They talked about their young children. They marveled at the similarities in their life stories: both children of immigrants with humble beginnings, both evangelists for the American Dream, both viscerally disturbed by Trump’s animus toward people like them. By the time dessert was served, Haley made it clear she would throw her support behind Rubio. But she added a caveat. “I will campaign all across South Carolina with you. I will do whatever it takes to help you beat Donald Trump. But I only ask one thing,” Haley told Rubio. “I never want to be in the same room as Terry Sullivan.”
Rubio agreed. Then, immediately upon leaving the governor’s mansion, he got his campaign manager and other senior staff on the phone. There were whoops of elation on the other end of the line; Haley’s endorsement would come as a shock so close to the South Carolina primary, and maybe, just maybe, it could help them carry the state and arrest Trump’s momentum. After the celebration died down, Rubio informed them of Haley’s ground rule. The line fell silent. “What the hell did you do to this woman?” Rubio asked Sullivan.
(The next day, Haley phoned Bush to inform him that she would be endorsing Rubio—his former pupil in Florida—and not him. Several people close to Bush described the call as the low point of his campaign; he hung up incredulously after Haley explained that her priority, more than rewarding friendship, was stopping Trump. Their relationship has never recovered.)
In the 72 hours before South Carolina’s primary, Haley helped Rubio put on a rock concert across the state. The two of them were joined at events by Tim Scott, who had also endorsed Rubio. Here was the future of Republicanism—an Indian-American governor, a Black senator, a Cuban-American presidential candidate—joining forces to fight back against a frontrunner who was race-baiting and hate-mongering his way to the party’s nomination for president. Haley took this mission especially personally. “I wanted somebody,” she declared when endorsing Rubio, “that was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
Gov. Nikki Haley introduces Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio as Sen. Tim Scott listens, during a campaign stop at Clemson University, Feb. 19, 2016. | AP Photo/Paul Sancya
It didn’t do much good: Trump romped by double digits in the South Carolina primary, establishing himself as the overwhelming favorite in the race. At this point, Haley’s staff counseled her with caution. Trump was emerging as the inevitable Republican nominee. Continuing to promote Rubio at his expense, and sticking to policy contrasts, was one thing. But going after Trump personally, they told her, could prove ruinous to her career. Haley said she understood. But under the bright lights, she became incorrigible. She mocked his failed business ventures. She razzed him for not releasing his tax returns. She accused him of being “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.”
Most notably, Haley excoriated Trump for failing to denounce Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. “We saw and looked at true hate in the eyes last year in Charleston,” Haley told an Atlanta crowd just before Super Tuesday. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president.”
After bathing in a raucous ovation that lasted 25 seconds, Haley added, “That is not who our Republican Party is. That’s not who America is. When my parents came here, they came here because they knew there was love and acceptance in this country.”
Two weeks later, Rubio was out of the race, Trump had a stranglehold on the party of Lincoln and Haley was left to grapple with her decisions. She had been dogged for years by a reputation for saying and doing what was expedient. Now, she was being punished for singing the animating notes of her political soul. The governor’s approval rating among Republicans continued to slide. Powerful Republicans in Columbia whispered that her career was over.
What hit particularly hard: Haley’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, had been the first statewide officeholder in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina to endorse Trump. Once rivals for governor in 2010, Haley and McMaster had become friends. She hired several of his former staffers and was happy to see him elected lieutenant governor in 2014. But the two had a dramatic rupture early in his tenure; when McMaster, who presided over the Senate, refused to rule on a parliamentary question the way Haley ordered, she rushed to Facebook and wrote a statement upbraiding him. It was a reckless and wildly disproportionate move, one that permanently soured their relationship.
Henry McMaster, right, and Nikki Haley, left, during a press conference on Dec. 4, 2013, in Myrtle Beach, S.C. | Janet Blackmon Morga/The Sun News via AP
When people describe Haley as lucky, it’s because of this: McMaster is the one who unwittingly rescued Haley’s career.
She kept her head down after Trump won the nomination. When her friend, vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, asked her to introduce him at the 2016 convention, Haley made clear she would not pay tribute to Trump on national television, and after some back-and-forth, angered Pence’s staff by ultimately declining. Her determination to stay above the fray extended to “Access Hollywood” weekend, when many GOP leaders questioned whether Trump should quit the race. (Haley had the good fortune, friends joke, of having a hurricane hit South Carolina that weekend.)
On Election Day 2016, Haley, much like then-House Speaker Paul Ryan and a number of other Republicans who’d been outspoken Trump critics, expected to have their objections vindicated. Instead, Trump won the presidency, leaving Haley in a state of shock. When a friend texted her in dismay, Haley replied, “Cheer up. We just won the governor’s races in Vermont, Indiana and North Dakota.” Gallows humor aside, Haley was dazed. She had been preparing to campaign as the face of the post-Trump GOP—with bookings on “The Today Show” the morning after Election Day, and “Meet the Press” that Sunday—but now it was futile. She canceled the bookings.
To say Haley was a long shot to join the Trump administration would be inaccurate. She had no shot whatsoever. The president-elect remembered her ad hominem insults during the primary campaign, and was heard more than once referring to Haley as “a bitch.” Unlike other Republicans who had attacked him—Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul—Haley had not apologized or come to kiss his ring. Trump had no use for her, ignoring the pleas of Pence to consider her for a prominent role.
And then, a few days after the election, Trump called McMaster. He was prepared to give him almost any position in government that he desired. “Henry, what do you want?” the president-elect asked. “Name it.”
McMaster told Trump he didn’t want to join the administration. He wanted to be governor. “That’s it?” Trump replied. “Well, that should be easy. You’re already the lieutenant governor!”
Explaining that it wasn’t that simple, McMaster decided to communicate more directly. “I need Nikki Haley out of the way,” McMaster told Trump. “I want you to find any job she will take.”
U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley listens to a speech during a Security Council meeting on the situation in Palestine at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on Dec. 8, 2017. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
‘WE CAN’T GET OUR SHIT TOGETHER’
Watching as Haley headlined Trump rallies in Pennsylvania the week before Election Day, I was struck by the fine line she was already walking.
The first draft of her presidential stump speech was coming along nicely. She would tell of how, when Trump asked her to become his ambassador to the United Nations, she told him there were three conditions.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ve been a governor; I don’t want to work for anybody else. I would want to work directly with you. So, it would need to be a cabinet position.’ And he said, ‘Done. What else?’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m a policy girl, so I want to be in the room when decisions are made. So, I need to be on the National Security Council.’ And he said, ‘Done. What else?’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be a wallflower or a talking head. I need to be able to say what I think.’ And he said, ‘Nikki, that’s exactly why I want you to do this.’ And he was true to his word from the first day to the last day.’”
After the cheers died down, she would nod waggishly to the president’s callowness—“He can always be interesting!”—and build to a real crowd-pleaser, telling how Trump came to the U.N. during an impasse with North Korea over its nuclear capacities, and, despite her misgivings, denounced Kim Jong-Un as “little rocket man.” Not long after the speech, she would add with a mischievous grin, the prime minister of Uganda asked her, “So, Madam Ambassador, what are we going to about this little rocket man?” With the crowd roaring, Haley would conclude, “His name-calling has gone international!”
The crux of Haley’s speech was an argument that U.S. foreign policy had been the unsung success story of the past four years; that America had deterred North Korea, bankrupted Iran, confronted China and defended Israel. But the subtext wasn’t simply that Trump had overshadowed these accomplishments with his brutish behavior. The subtext was that it didn’t need to be this way—that diplomacy and decency are not mutually exclusive.
Friends of Haley say she was genuinely surprised, upon joining the administration and immersing herself in the realm of geopolitics, at how often her instincts aligned with Trump’s. (“On his policy, I agree with everything that he’s done,” she told me in one interview, an assertion she walked back only slightly when I mentioned deliberate family separation at the southern border.) Perhaps this owes to some shared traits: reflexive distrust of strangers, personal and political insecurity, a patronage approach to relationships. Danny Danon, who served alongside Haley as Israel’s ambassador, remembers being “shocked” at her idea to host a dinner for diplomats—and not invite those who voted against America’s position at the U.N. “The European representatives were really upset,” Danon told me. “But for her, that was the point—there were going to be consequences if you didn’t show your support.”
HALEY ON THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
“We’ve lost seven out of the last eight popular vote elections. That doesn’t mean there’s something right with them. That means there’s something wrong with us. We’ve got to fix it.”
Of course, this shouldn’t be confused for a comprehensive foreign-policy framework. Haley struck up a relationship with famed diplomat Henry Kissinger while in New York, going to his club for monthly lunches and hosting him at her apartment for dinner on several occasions. When I pressed Kissinger to describe the Haley Doctrine—to classify her views in the sweep of modern U.S. foreign policy—he took a long pause. “I think I’d rather not get into that question. It’s a very good question, and it’s a question I’d like to answer for myself at some point.”
Whatever her alignment with Trump’s ideas, Haley found herself increasingly annoyed by the president’s inability to get out of his own way. The more she came to subscribe to a Trumpian view of international affairs—punishing disloyalty, practicing transactionalism—the more she came to resent her boss for his petty distractions and self-defeating antics. This formed a thematic spine for Haley’s second book, With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace, which published a year after her exit from the White House. Not much reading between the lines was necessary. Haley’s theory: You can be tough without being truculent; you can be a nationalist without being a nativist; you can get results without getting on Twitter.
President Donald Trump greets Ambassador Nikki Haley during an event celebrating Women's History Month at the White House, Mar. 29, 2017. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
“I hope the Republican Party will leave the anger and focus on the policy and communication going forward and really build us to what I know we can be,” she told me. “We’re not perfect. We’ve got to fix things. Let’s fix them. Let’s keep going. But what I don’t want is for us to look distracted in the eyes of China and Russia, because I know what they do when we’re distracted.”
“We look pretty distracted right now, don’t we?” I asked.
“When I was at the U.N., it killed me,” Haley replied. “I could not even stomach it when the government shut down [in 2019]. And I was not at the U.N. at that point. When it shut down and I looked at that Security Council chamber and I saw ambassadors and their staffs there—and I saw the American ambassador with no staff—do you know what that says to the world? That we can’t get our shit together.”
This is the essence of Haley’s presidential pitch—that she can help America get its shit together. Her belief in herself is almost as strong as her conviction that the people running this country are out of their depth. When I asked Haley whether she thought she could do the job of president, she replied with startling speed, “Yeah, of course I do.”
Haley arrives at her confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2017. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
‘I DON’T TRUST’
This self-confidence isn’t a revelation to anyone in Trump’s orbit.
Despite being 230 miles from the White House, she made no secret of her opinion that Trump’s government was being run into the ground by incompetent egomaniacs. Haley would sneak into Washington unannounced and find an audience with the president, over the objections of people like John Kelly and Rex Tillerson, pleading a case separate from theirs. She would backchannel with foreign governments—and with U.S. officials—in a manner that made her appear the de facto secretary of state, which caused Tillerson to vent on more than a few occasions about “that bitch.” (Tillerson declined to comment for this story; John Bolton, who also came to detest Haley during their time in the administration, wrote in his memoir about Trump telling him the story of Tillerson calling Haley “nothing but a c---” to her face.)
That Haley was one of few high-ranking women in an administration that was at times cartoonishly misogynistic did not win her many friends. And given that this 40-something woman was new to the national security world—her only foreign policy experience coming from pitching tax subsidies to German automakers—Haley’s cockiness was bound to put a target on her back. But what made Haley so hated was that she played the game better than they did. No one else in the administration could get away with being so privately critical of Trump while never appearing publicly to be at odds with him. Unlike Kelly and Tillerson and others, Haley never felt the need to plot behind Trump’s back because she knew he would listen to her.
“Some people approached their job from the perspective of wanting to control outcomes,” H.R. McMaster (no relation to Henry), who served as Trump’s national security adviser, told me. “I think that in the case of serving a very disruptive—maybe the most unconventional president in American history—there were some people who wanted to try to control the president’s decisions. And they got confused about who owns foreign policy.”
McMaster, a retired four-star general, became one of Haley’s few allies in the administration. He said what set her apart was an embrace of some “unconventional” arguments that broke from the consensus on the National Security Council—including his own positions—and her advocacy of positions that were closer to Trump’s. “She understood what her role was and that’s what made her effective,” McMaster said. “That’s also what ruffled some feathers.”
Some of the most disheveled feathers could be found inside the vice president’s office. Once, Mike Pence had been a friend of Haley’s, even a confidante. The former governors could speak candidly about White House drama and coordinate messages. But tensions surfaced in year two, owing to a certain wariness some of the vice president’s team felt watching Haley operate. While Pence was stuck cleaning up messes in D.C.—or, more often, denying there was any mess at all—she was winning a glut of glowing media reviews, hosting exclusive salons and charming big donors at her Manhattan apartment, all while owning the Israel issue in ways no Republican could dream of.
The likelihood of a Pence-Haley primary fight in 2024 had long been murmured about inside the West Wing. When Haley resigned, keeping her head down for all of five minutes before she began maneuvering toward a future run, the vice president’s team went on high alert. Things escalated permanently when Nick Ayers, the longtime Haley adviser who spent 2017 and 2018 serving as Pence’s chief of staff, followed her out the door following the midterm elections, turning down the top job of White House chief of staff—and making it known that he would be with Haley, not Pence, in 2024. (Ayers’ protégé, strategist Austin Chambers, is said to be the leading candidate to be her campaign manager. Haley’s team denied this and both Ayers and Chambers declined to comment.)
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, left, whispers to Vice President Mike Pence during a high level Security Council meeting on U.N. peacekeeping operations, Sept. 20, 2017. | AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
A bad situation got much worse in the middle of 2019, when the president began speculating—first in small conversations and then loosely in front of larger audiences—about the prospect of replacing Pence with Haley on the 2020 ticket. Haley was more popular than his vice president, Trump would say, and she could do wonders for his deficits with suburban women. Then, in July of 2019, both Pence and Haley were invited to address a megadonor retreat in Aspen, Colorado. To the surprise of some attendees, the U.N. ambassador was given the better slot, delivering a keynote dinner address, while the vice president spoke at breakfast the next morning. Marc Short, a staunch Pence loyalist who replaced Ayers as chief of staff, viewed this as an act of war. He believed Haley’s team was looking for ways to upstage the vice president. According to multiple people familiar with their discussions, Short warned Pence that Haley was coming for him. (Both men declined to comment for this story.)
None of this is especially surprising given her long history of making political enemies. Everyone who has ever run against Haley has wound up alienated from her. And everyone who is considering a run against Haley—from her home state senator, Tim Scott, to the Trump-era diplomat who outranked her, Mike Pompeo—knows exactly what they’d be getting themselves into: She is as charming as she is cold-blooded, the sort of politician other politicians love to hate. “I kick with a smile,” she told me, nodding knowingly. “I’ve always kicked with a smile.”
A “Make America Great Again” cap was autographed by Nikki Haley during a campaign event in Pennsylvania. | Tim Alberta
Haley said she’s not intimidated by the potential ugliness of a presidential race: “If you can get through South Carolina, you can get through anything, because it is literally the most brutal battlefield you’ll ever face.” But that theory will be tested. Wait until the old affair rumors come roaring back to life. Wait until the photos of her pilgrimage to a Sikh temple in India—clad in ritualistic attire, with a head cover and red bindi on her forehead—go viral on far-right websites. Wait until the once-fringe elements of the GOP that are now very much mainstream begin spinning conspiracies about who she is and where she’s from and what her real plans are.
HALEY ON THE STATE OF THE GOP
“This is rock bottom. We’ve lost the House, we’ve lost the Senate, we’ve lost the White House, we had one of the worst days in modern history. … I’m frustrated that we are in this place, but I am not going to let this define the Republican party.”
Nothing will be off-limits. Haley is hyped by donors principally because they see her working magic with suburban women, reconnecting the party with a demographic that Trump drove away. But Haley’s gender will almost certainly be used against her—perhaps in unexpected ways. (Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager, has been overheard advising South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to run against Haley as “the hotter, Trumpier, real American governor.”)
Meanwhile, Haley has fewer loyalists to protect her than ever before. Tim Pearson, who won renown for his management of Haley’s gubernatorial campaigns, and spent years as her top aide, is no longer inside the circle. The reason? Haley blew up after learning that Pearson was secretly dating her assistant—something she viewed as a breach of trust, even though the two are now married and have a child. Haley knows her paranoia is a problem—“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust”—but there’s really no solving it.
Perhaps the greatest threat to Haley is Fox News after dark. There is a reason she went on Laura Ingraham’s show on January 25—a few weeks after blaming Trump for the siege of the Capitol—and said we should “give the man a break.” (This was my latest Haley-induced whiplash; it made, by my count, three distinct stances on Trump in the span of six weeks.) She has never had personal relationships with Fox’s stars the way other Republicans do. When Tucker Carlson went after Haley last summer—responding to her empathetic remarks about George Floyd’s murder by declaring, “What Nikki Haley does best is moral blackmail”—the entire 2024 field took notice. Carlson has clearly taken a disliking to Haley. What happens if he, or Sean Hannity, or some combination of these and other right-wing voices, make it their mission to take her down?
Haley rolled her eyes when I asked about Carlson. “I’ve dealt with people like him all my life,” she said. Haley didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t need to. She’s dealt with men, white men, race-baiting white men, all her life. This campaign, she implied, wouldn’t be any different.
In Nov. 2010, Governor-elect Haley shares a hug with her mother, Raj Randhawa. | Chris Keane/Getty Images
But it could be. There is a path of least resistance that Haley could yet pursue. No matter her passion in denouncing the president during our January 12 interview, no matter her certainty that he was crippled and the party was moving on without him, there is still time for Haley to recover. A campaign launch is two years off. She can work to rekindle that warm relationship with Trump, persuading him and his family that she got carried away. She can pretend that Marjorie Taylor Greene is just another harmless GOP backbencher. She can cozy up to the heavyweights at Fox News and convince them to pull their punches. She can pour her time and energy into denouncing those damned socialists in the Democratic Party, carrying forth as the partisan warrior queen, crossing her fingers and hoping that everyone from the redhats to the Republican National Committee members forget her momentary lapse.
Or she can say what she wants to say. She can cast her lot with Liz Cheney. She can campaign as herself. She can prove—once and for all—that her parents made the right choice by coming to the United States of America.
Hoping for a hint, I asked Haley on January 12: Does she still consider Trump a friend?
“Friend,” she answered, “is a loose term.”
Illustration by Piotr Lesniak. Art direction and design by Megan McCrink and Erin Aulov. Development by Arjun Kakkar and Beatrice Jin. Photo research by Katie Ellsworth and Bill Kuchman.
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