Washington: Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, the only Republican candidate left in the race for the party’s nomination against Donald Trump, has said that the US would have a “female president in 2024”, and it would be either her or Kamala Harris, both of them Indian-origin.
After wins Thursday in Nevada and the US Virgin Islands, Trump remains undefeated in the primary race. Haley has said she will stay in the race for the White House even after the embarrassment in Nevada and with polling showing her trailing badly in her home state of South Carolina, which holds the next Republican primary February 24.
“This is about the fact that we are going to have a female president of the United States, and either it will be me or it will be Kamala Harris,” the 52-year-old Indian-American Republican politician told Fox News.
Haley said she voted for Trump twice and is “proud” to serve in his administration as the UN ambassador. “But chaos follows him… we can’t be a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it,” she said.
She said: “Trump cannot win a general election. That’s a fact. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020. We lost in 2022… He’s got a year’s worth of court cases yet… Everything he touches is chaos, and we continue to lose.”
Former president Trump, 77, won Nevada’s Republican presidential caucuses Thursday after he was the only major candidate to compete. Haley skipped the caucuses, calling it an “unfair process favouring Trump”.
Haley said, “We knew that it was rigged from the start.” In separate interviews, Haley emphasised that “we knew months ago that we weren’t going to spend a day or a dollar in Nevada, because it wasn’t worth it. And so we didn’t even count Nevada. That wasn’t anything we were looking at”.
She reiterated her focus is on the next major contest in the GOP nominating calendar — the primary in her home state of South Carolina February 24 — as well as on Super Tuesday. Michigan holds its primary February 27, three days after the South Carolina Republican primary. As many as 15 states, including California and Texas, hold their contests a week later, Tuesday.
Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa in South Carolina to immigrant Sikh parents from Amritsar, Punjab.
Kamala scripted history by becoming the first woman, as well as the first African-American and Asian-American, to be elected US Vice President, and assumed office January 20, 2021. The 59-year-old was born in Oakland, California, to a Jamaican American father and a Tamil Indian mother.
PTI