Nikki Haley ‘no moderate,’ progressives warn as far-right Republican runs for President

Following former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s launch of her 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday, progressives cautioned that while the Republican has spent years cultivating a so-called “moderate” public persona, her policy positions make it abundantly clear that as president, she would promote a right-wing agenda similar to the Trump administration, in which she served for nearly two years.

Haley, who also served as South Carolina’s governor before joining the administration of former President Donald Trump in 2017, has advanced right-wing policies both domestically and abroad, and since leaving public office four years ago, has used her platform to promote “extreme hardline positions on foreign policy,” wrote Daniel Larison at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The Republican has strived to center her response to the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston by a white supremacist as evidence of her moderation, including in her campaign launch video footage of the speech she gave weeks after the massacre when signing a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol.

Progressive strategist Sawyer Hackett noted, however, that moments earlier in the video she denied that the deep history of institutional racism has contributed to persistent inequality in the United States.

Haley’s campaign launch ad also included a claim that President Joe Biden is promoting a “socialist” agenda, which Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Rev. Dr. William Barber II interpreted as an attack on those who “believe in living wages, voting rights, and healthcare for all.”