Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Tuesday issued a video statement in which she officially threw her hat in the ring for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, becoming the first major challenger to former President Donald Trump.
“I’m Nikki Haley and I’m running for president,” Haley said in the video, which she shared on social media and on her newly launched campaign page.
Haley, who served as Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, plans to lay out her campaign plans in a speech in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday.
Tough on China
She highlighted her foreign policy experience in the video, warning of threats to America’s pre-eminent status in the international domain.
“China and Russia are on the march. They all think we can be bullied, kicked. You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels,” she said.
“In China, they commit genocide,” she said, while in Iran “they murder their own people for challenging the government.”
“It puts things into perspective,” she continued. “Even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America.”
Haley in May 2022 said that the controversial U.N. Human Rights Council must investigate the Chinese “genocide” of minorities, otherwise a planned visit by the U.N. Human Rights commissioner to the country would be just “one more Chinese publicity stunt.”
The Chinese regime has been accused of committing atrocities in Xinjiang.
After U.N. high commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet visited Xinjiang, Haley called the visit a “total communist propaganda victory lap and an insult to every victim of genocide.”
Pushback Against Leftist Revisionism
Domestically, Haley said she’d push back against efforts by the “socialist left” to “rewrite” America’s history, presumably referring to the progressive campaign to portray the founding of the United States as steeped in racism rather than in opposition to slavery and the protection of individual liberties.
By Tom Ozimek
