What planet is she from???

Nikki Haley: ‘We’ve never been a racist country’

By BRAKKTON BOOKER

What up, Recast fam! Donald Trump campaigns with former rival Vivek Ramaswamy in New Hampshire… but not before the former president stopped by a New York courtroom for jury selection in his civil defamation trial. Longshot Democratic White House hopeful Dean Phillips scrubs DEI references from his campaign website, and an interesting rift emerges between independent candidates Cornel West and RFK Jr. First, we focus on Nikki Haley’s closing arguments.

The historic margin of victory in Iowa on Monday, for many, provided all the evidence needed that the remainder of the 2024 primary is nothing more than Donald Trump’s GOP coronation.

Even so, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley boldly projected confidence in the wake of her defeat. Iowa caucusgoers, she said, did exactly what she needed them to do: winnow the GOP presidential field and set up next week’s New Hampshire primary as “a two-person race” with Trump.

That’s an audacious claim for someone who actually finished a distant third behind Trump. While she can claim the smallest of moral victories — denying her former boss from pitching a complete shutout en route to his victories in 98 of 99 Iowa counties — according to preliminary results from the Iowa GOP, Haley beat out Trump in Johnson County by a single vote.

Still, Haley will gladly take the eight delegates she earned with her ticket out of Iowa and look to rally voters in New Hampshire. It’s far more favorable terrain for her — if she can only find ways to avoid high-profile gaffes. More on that in a bit.

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First, it’s important to understand that unaffiliated voters outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire — and those voters can participate in party primaries.

So while Haley trails Trump among New Hampshire’s registered Republicans (58 percent for Trump to 21 percent for Haley), she is leading him by wide margins among unaffiliated voters (17 percent for Trump compared to 43 percent for Haley), according to a recent University of New Hampshire/CNN Granite State Poll.

It’s important to note that the poll was taken prior to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suspending his campaign.

So Haley’s claim, the one I called audacious, might not be so crazy after all. But then Haley shifts all attention from the task at hand.

During an appearance on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning she was asked to respond to a clip of MSNBC host Joy Reid describing what she sees as Haley’s chief issue for why Republican voters hold her at arm’s length. “The elephant in the room: She’s still a brown lady that’s still got to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant,” Reid said.

Brian Kilmeade of Fox News asked if Haley agreed with Reid’s interpretation.

Haley did not shy away from her Indian heritage, first swatting at Reid — she “lives in a different America” — before saying, “I mean yes, I’m a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a U.N. ambassador and who is now running for president.”

But she didn’t leave it there when Kilmeade followed up: “Are you involved in a racist party?”

“No,” retorted Haley, a child of the Deep South. “We’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country.”

She said more, but it’s irrelevant.

Once again, her actions raised the question: Is she willing to whitewash American history in exchange for votes?

On the one hand, she wants credit for being the first minority woman governor, the same one who led the charge, under pressure, to take down the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds following the racist terrorist attack at a Black church in 2015 — that same church President Joe Biden visited last week to woo Black voters. Race had a lot — if not everything — to do with those events.

It wasn’t the first time she stumbled on race. Just last month, Haley failed to name slavery as a leading cause for the Civil War, only to come back later with “of course the Civil War was about slavery, we know that,” following a torrent of negative reports which forced her course correction. Fittingly, that also took place as she was campaigning in New Hampshire.

Following the slavery omission, Republicans of color told me, “She’s toast.”

Will this turn off unaffiliated Granite Staters and those registered Republicans fed up with Trump? Doubtful.

But with less than a week to go before voters head to the polls, this is the type of misstep that raises doubts that she learned anything from last month’s fiasco. And that could pose problems for her if the goal is to win New Hampshire outright — or at least place a strong second to springboard her campaign to her home state of South Carolina next month.

We’ll certainly keep tabs on this to see how it all plays out.

All the best,

The Recast Team