Haley sometimes ties her upbringing to politics, mentioning how her mother criticizes people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without permission because she herself immigrated legally. But Haley has also had to contend with attacks from Trump based on her ethnicity.Trump called Haley “Nimbra” on his social media site in a recent post. That was an apparent intentional misspelling of part of her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Haley has used her middle name, “Nikki,” since childhood.Trump also has promoted false conspiracy theories about whether Haley was eligible to run for president because she is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants. Her birth in South Carolina makes her a natural-born citizen, one of three qualifications to hold the U.S. presidency. Trump’s promotion of this false claim echoes his “birther” rhetoric about Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.When asked by reporters whether Trump’s criticisms of her are racist, Haley has instead portrayed him as “desperate to stop our momentum,” using any means necessary to attack his opponents.“That’s what he does when he feels threatened. That’s what he does when he feels insecure,” Haley said during a town hall on CNN when asked about Trump’s false allegation that she was ineligible to be president. “I know that I am a threat. I know that’s why he’s doing that.”She often uses her own story as an example that the U.S. is fundamentally good.“We live in the best country in the world and we are a work in progress, and we’ve got a long way to go to fix all of our little kinks. But I truly believe our Founding Fathers had the best of intentions when they started, and we fixed it along the way,” Haley said as she struggled to make her point during a CNN town hall last month in New Hampshire, where host Jake Tapper asked her if, from a historical perspective, she believed that America had “never been a racist country.”Tapper argued that “America was founded institutionally on many racist precepts, including slavery.” Haley responded with a reference to the line that “all men are created equal,” but then finished her thought by saying that “the intent was everybody was going to be created equally.”In her memoirs and public appearances, Haley has often recounted experiencing discrimination during her childhood: bullying, comments about her ethnicity in school, being disqualified from a beauty pageant for being neither white nor Black. Her father, a professor at a historically Black university, was racially profiled at a farmer’s market.Haley says she dealt with racism through bridge-building.“This habit of finding the similarities and avoiding the differences became very natural to me over time,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir.During a 2014 visit to India, Haley spoke with an Indian news channel about her heritage and discrimination. Asked whether she felt the need to “disown” parts of her heritage to work in American politics, Haley said her background was core to her identity.“I’m very, very proud of being the daughter of Indian parents, and I talk about it because it’s something that’s very special to me,” Haley said. “It is who I am.”
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