Nikki Haley

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘I refuse to quit’: defiant Nikki Haley vows to stay in race against Trump

      by

      A defiant Nikki Haley on Tuesday declared no fear of retribution from Donald Trump as she persists in her efforts to compete against the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, saying, “I feel no need to kiss the ring.”Haley approaches the South Carolina primary on Saturday, her home state where she was previously governor, a long way behind Trump but turning up the rhetorical heat.“We’ve all heard the calls for me to drop out,” she said in a speech in Greenville, South Carolina, on Tuesday. But she also said: “I refuse to quit.”And in an interview with the Associated Press, she vowed to stay in the fight at least until after Super Tuesday’s slate of more than a dozen contests on 5 March.“Ten days after South Carolina, another 20 states vote. I mean, this isn’t Russia. We don’t want someone to go in and just get 99% of the vote,” Haley said, adding: “What is the rush? Why is everybody so panicked about me having to get out of this race?”In a cutting remark on X, formerly Twitter, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung posted in a riposte to Haley’s kissing the ring statement: “She’s going to drop down to kiss ass when she quits, like she always does.”Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, responded with sarcastic humor on the same platform.“What a move. @TheStevenCheung is the key to winning back suburban women!” she posted.In Greenville, Haley taunted that maybe some people, especially reporters, turned out to hear if she was going to drop out of the race after Trump won the first three contests of the primary race, in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.“Well, I’m not. Far from it, and I’m here to tell you why,” she said. “I’m running for president because we have a country to save,” she said, listing domestic issues such as crime, gun violence, illegal drugs, children struggling with their studies, migration at the US-Mexico border and the high cost of many things from groceries to buying a house.And on foreign policy, she said: “I’m talking about the American weakness that led to wars in Europe, and the Middle East, and the urgent need to restore strength before war spreads and draws America further in. These are the challenges I’m here to tackle.”Trump has been scathing about Haley’s performance and has been leading pressure from several directions for her to drop out, after she became the last opponent left standing following the end of the campaign trail for rivals including Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.Haley said on Tuesday: “Many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump, privately dread him. They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid…I feel no need to kiss the ring. I have no fear of Trump’s retribution. I’m not looking for anything from him.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Republicans are encouraging Haley to stay in the campaign even if she continues to lose – potentially all the way to the Republican National Convention in July, as Trump faces numerous court cases.Haley said: “He’s going to be in a courtroom all of March, April, May and June. How in the world do you win a general election when these cases keep going and the judgments keep coming?”Meanwhile, Joe Biden was asked whether he preferred to compete against Haley or Trump this fall.“Oh, I don’t care,” the US president said.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump acknowledges Navalny’s death days later, without mentioning Putin

      by

      Donald Trump has offered a belated acknowledgement of the purportedly sudden death of Alexei Navalny, three days after the Russian opposition leader collapsed in one of Russia’s penal colonies. But Trump failed to join with – or acknowledge – international outrage at Navalny’s political nemesis, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. The former US president and presumptive Republican White House nominee added: “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”Trump’s statement, which turned a grave global political issue into one of significance to his agenda, comes one day after Nikki Haley – his lone remaining opponent in the Republican presidential primary – criticized him for avoiding substantial comment on Navalny’s death.“Either he sides with Putin and thinks it’s cool that Putin killed one of his political opponents – or he just doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Haley said on Sunday on ABC News’ This Week. “Either one of those is concerning. Either one of those is a problem.”Separately, minutes before his Truth Social post about Navalny on Monday, Haley had appeared on Fox News and said: “It is amazing to me how weak in the knees [Trump] is when it comes to Putin.”“He is yet to say anything about Navalny’s death, which – Putin murdered him,” Haley said.Haley, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations during Trump’s presidency, joined other prominent American politicians, including Joe Biden, in condemning Putin for Navalny’s death.Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, on Monday accused Putin of killing her husband. She also accused Russian authorities of hiding his corpse and of waiting for traces of the Novichok nerve agent to disappear from his body.“I urge you to stand next to me,” Navalnaya said in comments directed to Russians generally. “I ask you to share the rage with me – rage, anger, hatred towards those who dared to kill our future.”But Trump, who frequently praised Putin during his single term in the White House, has largely elected to remain silent about Navalny’s death.Haley’s criticism of Trump’s approach to Navalny’s death comes as the former president leads her by 30 percentage points in polling ahead of the forthcoming Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, where she was once governor.At a recent campaign rally in that state, Trump claimed to have told the head of state “of a big country” while he was in the Oval Office that if the foreign leader’s nation did not meet its financial obligations to Nato, then Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” as far as Trump was concerned.The Republican US senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on Sunday said that he supported Trump’s call for fair contributions to the Nato alliance. “I want to have a system where if you don’t pay, you get kicked out,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut, Graham added, “No, I’m not inviting Russia to invade Ukraine,” as it did nearly two years ago.In his statement on Navalny, Trump identified only his personal political priorities and issues, alluding to the immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border and his lies that he lost the 2020 election to Biden because of electoral fraud.He also referred to “unfair courtroom decisions” as he faces more than 90 pending criminal charges, including for subversion of the election that he lost to Biden. Trump additionally is grappling with how to pay civil judgments in excess of half a billion dollars after being adjudicated a business fraudster as well as being found liable for sexually abusing and defaming the magazine columnist E Jean Carroll.“WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” he wrote in his post about Navalny.Despite his reluctance to dwell on Navalny, polls at the moment suggests Trump enjoys a slight advantage with the American electorate over Biden. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Nikki Haley condemns Trump for not commenting on Alexei Navalny death

      by

      Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley on Sunday criticized her party’s leading contender for the White House nomination, Donald Trump, for avoiding meaningful comment on the death of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned political nemesis of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.“Either he sides with Putin and thinks it’s cool that Putin killed one of his political opponents – or he just doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Haley said Sunday on ABC News This Week. “Either one of those is concerning. Either one of those is a problem.”The attack which Haley aimed at Trump with respect to Navalny came six days before her home state of South Carolina was scheduled to host its Republican presidential preference primary. With the rest of the Republican field having dropped out, polls show Haley, the ex-governor of South Carolina, trails the former president by more than 30 percentage points.Haley joined other prominent US politicos – including Democratic president Joe Biden – in blaming Putin for Navalny’s death Friday at a Russian penal colony. Trump, on the other hand, has declined to directly remark on the death of Navalny, which authorities reportedly explained to his mother as occurring from “sudden death syndrome”.The former president – who once appointed Haley to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations – has only pledged on social media to “bring peace, prosperity and stability” if he is given another term in the Oval Office.Haley on Sunday said that Trump’s response had not gone nearly far enough.“I think it’s important to stand with the Russian people who believe Navalny was really talking for them,” Haley told the host of This Week, Jonathan Karl. “I mean you look at this hero – he was fighting corruption, he was fighting what Putin does. And what did Putin do? He killed him just like he does all his political opponents. And I think that’s very telling.”Haley added that the 47-year-old Navalny’s death was an opportunity for political leaders in the US “to remind the American people that Vladimir Putin is not our friend”.“Vladimir Putin is not cool. This is not someone we want to associate with,” Haley said. “This is not someone we want to be friends with. This is not someone that we can trust.”Haley’s remarks alluded to how Trump – during his presidency from 2017 to 2021 – demonstrated favor and, arguably, subservience to Putin. They also came a little more than a week after Trump caused global alarm with a campaign speech in South Carolina during which he declared that he would encourage Russia to attack any Nato allies whom he considered to have not paid enough to maintain the alliance.The former UN ambassador on Sunday called Trump’s earlier Nato comments “bone chilling”.“All he did in that one moment was empower Putin,” Haley said.Throwing in a reference to Russia’s jailing of Wall Street reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges which the US have dismissed as bogus, Haley continued: “All [Trump] did in that one moment was he sided with a guy who kills his political opponents – he sided with a thug that arrests American journalists and holds them hostage.“And he sided with a guy who wanted to make a point to the Russian people: ‘Don’t challenge me in the next election, or this will happen to you, too.’”Haley said Americans needed to “start waking up to what this means”, and she called it essential for Ukraine to fend off the invasion Russia launched nearly two years earlier.Trump was entering the South Carolina primary under indictment on more than 90 criminal charges, including for trying to illegally nullify his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election. He is also faced with having to pay civil judgments in excess of half a billion dollars after being adjudicated a business fraudster as well as being found liable for sexually abusing and defaming magazine columnist E Jean Carroll.Nonetheless, polls at the moment show Trump enjoys a relatively slight advantage with the American electorate over Biden. More

    • 213 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s legal woes have now set him back by more than $500m – how will he pay?

      by

      Donald Trump awoke on Saturday facing a stark new reality of legal obligations in excess of half a billion dollars after his stunning defeat in his civil fraud trial a day earlier, and questions swirled over his ability, or intention, to pay.Yet the former president remained defiant late on Friday, insisting in a vitriolic rant from his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida that he would win an appeal against a New York judge’s ruling that he must pay more than $350m plus pre-judgment interest for intentional financial fraud stretching more than a decade.Lashing out at the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who brought the case, and state judge Arthur Engoron, who issued the penalty, as “totally corrupt”, Trump slammed what he said was a “sham prosecution” driven by Joe Biden and the Democratic party to prevent him from returning to the White House.“We’ll appeal, we’ll be successful,” he said. “A crooked New York judge ruled that I have to pay $355m for having built the perfect company. Great cash, great buildings, great everything.”The precise amount Trump was ordered to pay is not entirely clear. At a press conference on Friday night, James put the figure at $463.9m. “That represents $363.9m in disgorgement, plus $100m in interest, which will continue to increase every single day until it is paid,” she said.But with the ruling adding to the $83.3m he must pay writer E Jean Carroll from a defamation hearing last month, plus another $5m from the original case last year that found he sexually abused her, Trump’s legal debts are mounting quickly – and are estimated now at about $542m, including interest.Nikki Haley, Trump’s sole remaining rival for the Republican presidential nomination, speculated he would siphon campaign cash from the Republican National Committee (RNC) to pay at least some of it.“I don’t want the RNC to become his piggy bank for his personal court cases,” she told CNN’s The Source.“We’ve already seen him spend $50m worth of campaign contributions … Now we see him trying to get control of the RNC so that he can continue not to have to pay his own legal fees.”Trump has moved to install his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the RNC, with other loyalists in leadership positions.Analysts say it’s possible he can delay paying up by appealing Engoron’s ruling. That’s what he did in the first Carroll case by depositing the $5m into a court-controlled account, plus an additional $500,000 in interest required by New York law.But such a strategy would also be costly. One alternative is securing a bond paying only a portion upfront, which would come with interest and fees and the challenge of finding a financial institution willing to front him the money.In the civil fraud case, it will be up to the courts to decide how much Trump must put up as he mounts his appeal. And he may be required to pay the full sum immediately after the appellate court rules, which could come as soon as this summer, according to University of Michigan law professor Will Thomas.“New York’s judicial system has shown a willingness to move quickly on some of these Trump issues,” Thomas said.“When we hear from the first appellate court, that’s a point where money is almost certainly going to change hands.”Bloomberg estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.3bn. But it is unclear how much cash he has on hand. Much of his wealth is tied up in a global real estate portfolio, and James’s team determined in 2020 he had less than $100m in liquid assets.Under the ruling, Trump would still be liable even if the Trump Organization declared bankruptcy. Enforcement of the judgment would be paused with a personal declaration of bankruptcy, but that would further harm his credibility as he pursues a return to the presidency.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling, meanwhile, also makes it hard for any family member to run the Trump Organization in the near future.Trump’s adult sons – Eric, the company’s chief executive, and Donald Jr – were each fined $4m and banned from serving as officers or directors of any corporation or entity in New York for two years. Donald Trump and two other executives were barred for three.For James, the ruling marks the successful culmination of a case years in the making. Her office has been investigating Trump’s business since 2019, finding that it consistently overvalued its properties and other assets to illegally obtain favorable terms on loans and insurance.One of the most striking examples concerned Trump’s triplex apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, which records showed was reported to be 30,000 sq ft but is closer to 11,000 sq ft.Another was the worth of Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. While Engoron valued it at a conservative $18m, Trump continues to insist it is worth “50 to 100 times” that figure.In determining the size of the fine, Engoron agreed with prosecutors that Trump saved about $168m in interest by inflating the value of assets. Another $126m profit came from selling the Old Post Office building in Washington DC that Engoron said Trump could not have bought without false financial statements.In her own press conference on Friday night in Manhattan, James mocked the title of Trump’s bestselling 1987 business advice book.“Donald Trump may have authored The Art of the Deal, but he perfected the art of the steal,” she said. “[He] falsely, knowingly inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself, his family and to cheat the system. This long-running fraud was intentional, egregious, illegal, and he did it, all of this, with the help of the other defendants, his two adult sons, and senior executives at the Trump Organization.“The scale and the scope of Donald Trump’s fraud is staggering. And so is his ego, and his belief that the rules do not apply to him.“We are holding him accountable for lying, cheating and a lack of contrition, and for flouting the rules of all of us. There cannot be different rules for different people in this country, and former presidents are no exception.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden blames Putin for Navalny’s death as Republican ‘apologists’ condemned

      by

      Joe Biden put the blame for the reported death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Friday squarely on Vladimir Putin, as many US politicians condemned Putin but also reacted angrily to the silence of some Republican lawmakers.“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” the US president said from the White House.“What has happened and evolving is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled, not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world. Putin does not only target citizens of other countries, as we have seen in what’s going on in Ukraine right now, he also inflicts terrible crimes on his own people.”Meanwhile some leading Republican politicians also decried Navalny’s death, while pointing the finger at some in their own party for appearing to appease the Russian leader.“There is no room in the Republican Party for apologists for Putin. RIP Alexey Navalny,” wrote the former vice-president Mike Pence on social media.Pence added: “Putin is a war criminal and only understands strength”, and urged Congress to “set aside the politics of the moment” and to pass legislation supporting aid to Ukraine.The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis also criticized Republicans who have expressed qualified sympathies for the Russian president.“Navalny laid down his life fighting for the freedom of the country he loved,” Tillis said.“Putin is a murderous, paranoid dictator. History will not be kind to those in America who make apologies for Putin and praise Russian autocracy. Nor will history be kind to America’s leaders who stay silent because they fear backlash from online pundits.”Both men were apparently referring to members of the Republican party who have in recent weeks slowed the passage of a $60bn military aid package to Ukraine.Last week, the Republican senator Ron Johnson was apparently moved to vote against the aid after watching Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson. Johnson said that while Putin “is a war criminal [who is] obviously not telling you the whole truth”, his sit-down with the former Fox News host was “very interesting”, and that “an awful lot of what Vladimir Putin said was right … accurate and obvious”.Others, including the Republican congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a House Freedom caucus member, have recently expressed open admiration for the Russian president.“Putin is a studied man of resolute spirit, and he always comes across as very sincere in his beliefs. You come away from a conversation with him thinking ‘I may not believe what he says, but I know he believes what he says,’” Higgins has said.In his address on Friday, Biden said that “history is watching the House of Representatives” and a “failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten. It will go down in the pages of history. It’s consequential, and the clock is ticking. This has to happen. We have to help now.”While none of the leaders immediately put out statements about Navalny, the Republican congressman Michael McCaul, who heads the foreign affairs committee, said: “If confirmed, the death of Alexei Navalny is a tragedy. He was a voice for a better Russia amid the corruption and brutality of Putin’s genocidal regime. The Kremlin must be held to account for this outrage.”Democratic leaders, for their part, expressed united outrage at Navalny’s death. The vice-president, Kamala Harris, called Navalny’s death in prison “a further sign of Putin’s brutality”.Whatever story they tell, let us be clear: Russia is responsible, and we will have more to say on this later,” Harris said at the top of keynote remarks at the Munich Security Conference.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReports of Navalny’s death come days after the likely Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, said the US would not defend Nato allies from Russian attack, a core principle of the alliance, if they did not meet their obligation to spend 2% of their national economic output on defense.On Friday, before the Navalny news, the Biden re-election campaign pushed out a fresh ad targeting Trump’s comments. “Trump wants to walk away from Nato. He’s even given Putin the green light to attack America’s allies,” it states, calling the former president’s rhetoric “shameful”, “weak” and “un-American”.Speaking at the White House, Biden took another swipe at Trump for his Nato comments, saying: “All of us should reject the dangerous statements made by the previous president that invited Russia to invade our Nato allies if they weren’t paying up.”Referring to Trump, Biden went on: “He said if an ally did not pay their dues, he encouraged Russia to, quote: ‘Do whatever the hell they want.’“I guess I should clear my mind a little bit and not say what I’m really thinking, but let me be clear – this is an outrageous thing for a [former] president to say. I can’t fathom it.“As long as I’m president, America stands by our sacred commitment to our Nato allies.”Trump did not mention the Navalny reports on Friday in their immediate aftermath, and instead posted a message about how he would save the Teamster union from the effects of immigration and another about the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis.The Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley hit out at Trump for his past praise of the Russian leader.“Putin did this,” Haley wrote on Friday morning on X, in response to news of Navalny’s death in prison. “The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends. The same Trump who said: ‘In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that.’”Biden, asked directly by a reporter at the White House whether Navalny’s death was an “assassination”, responded:“We don’t know exactly what happened but there’s no doubt that the death of Navalny is a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.” More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump says mixing Haley with Pelosi and Biden with Obama was tactic, not gaffe

      by

      Donald Trump claimed high-profile campaign trail gaffes, in which he seemed to think Barack Obama was still president and mistook Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi, were deliberate, the result of his being “sarcastic” in the first instance and choosing to “interpose” names in the second.“When I say ‘Barack Hussein Obama is the president of the United States’, [I am] meaning there’s a lot of control there because the one guy can’t put two sentences together,” the former president told supporters in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday.“So I say ‘Barack Hussein Obama’.”“The one guy” to whom Trump referred was Joe Biden, once Obama’s vice-president, who soundly beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election but whose fitness for office and a possible second term is now the subject of fierce speculation, given his age, 81, and allegations about his memory and performance.Trump, who is 77, is also the subject of fierce speculation over his mental state and fitness for office.Regardless – and despite his facing 91 criminal charges, attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection and civil suits including one in which he was adjudicated a rapist – the former president dominates the Republican primaries.Having won in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Trump enjoys huge polling leads over Haley in South Carolina, the former governor and UN ambassador’s home state which will be the next to vote.In North Charleston, Trump repeated his racist and Islamophobic dog whistle about Obama’s middle name, itself an echo of the “birther” conspiracy theory Trump helped spread (and which he recently sought to direct at Haley), which contended that Obama was not qualified to be president because he was supposedly not born in the US.“Remember Rush?” Trump asked, referring to Rush Limbaugh, the divisive rightwing talk radio host the comedian and senator Al Franken famously called a “big fat idiot” but whom Trump honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, not long before Limbaugh died of cancer.Impersonating Limbaugh’s habit of stressing Obama’s middle name, Trump said: “He used to go, ‘Barack Hussein Obama’. ‘He’d go ‘Barack Hussein Obama’. But he did that, Rush. Do we miss Rush? Yes.“But when I say that Obama is the president of our country, bah bah bah, they go, ‘He doesn’t know that it’s Biden. He doesn’t know.’ So it’s very hard to be sarcastic.“When I interpose, because I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan, and when I purposely interposed names, they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from Tricky Nikki. Tricky Dicky. He didn’t know.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn remarks in New Hampshire last month, Trump appeared to think Haley had been responsible for security at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.In fact, Pelosi was speaker of the House on the day Trump sent supporters to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden, a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and an attempt to remove Trump from the ballot which reached the US supreme court last week.“I interpose and they make a big deal out of it,” Trump continued. “I said, ‘No, no, I think they both stink, they have something in common. They both stink.’”According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “interpose” means “to place in an intervening position, or to put (oneself) between”.Trump possibly meant to say he “interpolated” Pelosi’s name for Haley’s – in the sense of “to alter or corrupt … by inserting new or foreign matter”. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump is ‘unhinged’ and ‘diminished’, says Nikki Haley

      by

      Donald Trump is “unhinged” and “diminished”, said Nikki Haley, the former president’s last rival for the Republican presidential nomination, on Wednesday.“To mock my husband, Michael and I can handle that,” the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador told NBC News’s Today, referring to comments by Trump about Michael Haley, a national guard officer deployed in Djibouti.“But you mock one member of the military, you mock all members of the military … Before, when he did it, it was during the 2016 election, and everybody thought, ‘Oh, did he have a slip? What did that mean?’ The problem now is he is not the same person he was in 2016. He is unhinged. He is more diminished than he was.”In the 2016 campaign, Trump mocked John McCain, an Arizona senator and former nominee for president who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Having avoided the draft for that war, Trump was expected to pay a heavy political price but did not, going on to attract controversy in office for allegedly deriding those who serve.Eight years later, Trump has won Republican votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and leads Haley in her own state, the next to vote, by vast margins.Haley’s use of the word “diminished” spoke to concerns about Trump’s age – 77 – but also that of the president, Joe Biden, who at 81 is facing a barrage of Republican attacks about his fitness for office. Haley, 52, has said older politicians should face cognitive tests.Initially shy of attacking Trump, Haley has turned fire his way as primary rivals have dropped out, leaving her the last impediment to a third Trump nomination. But Haley continues to say she will support Trump if he is nominated to take on Biden.“I have said any of those 14 [Republican candidates] would be better than Joe Biden,” she told NBC, “because everybody sees how diminished Joe Biden is.“[But] I will also tell you there is no way that the American people are going to vote for a convicted criminal. They’re not.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments: 40 for retaining classified information, 34 for hush-money payments to an adult film actor, 13 for attempted election subversion in Georgia and four for attempted federal election subversion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former president also faces civil suits over his business affairs and was on the receiving end of an $83.3m judgment in a defamation case arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”.After supreme court arguments last week, Trump looks set to survive state attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection, the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.Despite such dramas, Trump is poised to extend control over his party by installing a loyalist and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as Republican National Committee co-chairs and a campaign official, Chris LaCivita, as chief operating officer.Asked about Trump’s claim she was hurting the party by staying in the primary, Haley told NBC: “From a man who spent $50m of his own campaign contributions on his personal court cases, where the RNC is broke, I’m the one hurting in resources? I don’t think so.“I’m the one that saves the Republican party. Look at every general election poll. Look at any of them. Trump loses [to Biden] by five, by seven. On a good day, he’s even. Margin of error. I defeat Biden by up to 17 points.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Nikki Haley’s son calls Tim Scott ‘senator Judas’ over Trump support

      by

      The son of longshot Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley referred US senator Tim Scott – their fellow South Carolinan – as “senator Judas” while criticizing Scott’s endorsement of Donald Trump.“Senator Judas – excuse me, senator Scott,” Nalin Haley said during a campaign rally in Gilbert, South Carolina.Haley herself reportedly joked later on stage at the event, “Nalin, I will deal with you later.”According to Washington Post reporter Dylan Wells, a spokesperson for Scott responded by issuing a statement which referred to the senator’s mother and said: “You’d never hear Ms Frances or anyone from the Scott family talk like that.”Haley when she was governor of South Carolina appointed Scott to the US Senate in 2012 to fill the seat of Jim DeMint, who retired.Scott dropped out of the Republican presidential primary in November and in January announced his official endorsement of Trump, who is seeking to defeat Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to return to the White House.Haley said in an interview with Fox News on the endorsement: “South Carolina is a bloodsport. Everyone has a decision to make, and they have to live with their decision. He’ll have to live with his.”She added in response to Scott being floated as a possible running mate for Trump: “He’s going to be disappointed when Trump doesn’t win.”South Carolina is set to hold its Republican presidential preference primary on 24 February, where Haley is currently trailing in polls by double digits behind Trump in her home state.She was behind by 37 points in a recent Morning Consult poll and 26 points in a Washington Post-Monmouth survey.During an interview on CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Haley sought to make up some of the ground between her and Trump by criticizing comments the former president made about her husband, who is serving overseas with South Carolina’s national guard.Trump, at his own campaign rally Saturday, asked where Michael Haley was. Trump – who has often been seen without wife Melania by his side as he grapples with a litany of legal problems – also said Michael Haley was “gone”.Haley on Sunday said: “We can’t have someone who sits there and mocks our men and women who are trying to protect America.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe also said Trump’s disparaging remarks of military members was “a pattern”, which was possibly a reference to a report that the former president once referred to Americans who died in war as “losers” and “suckers”.Haley served as governor for nearly two terms before resigning in 2017 to serve as the US ambassador to the United Nations for the Trump White House.She has affirmed plans to remain in the Republican presidential primary through Super Tuesday on 5 March – when 16 state primary races are run – regardless of the result Haley’s campaign receives in South Carolina.Trump is enjoying his status as the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 White House nominee despite facing more than 90 pending criminal charges.Those charges allege that he tried to illegally subvert the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, improperly retained government secrets after his presidency and made illicit hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump. More