From the moment she was elected governor in 2010, Haley drew attention as a woman in a party dominated by men, a daughter of Indian immigrants in a party dominated by white people and a member of Generation X in a party dominated by boomers and the Silent Generation.
She was the first woman and first person of colour to lead South Carolina — not to mention, at 38, the youngest governor of any state at the time — and went on to become the first Indian American in a presidential Cabinet.
She spoke openly about how her gender and ethnicity had shaped her.
A notable moment came in 2015, when she explained her decision to call for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol after a massacre by a white supremacist at an African American church in Charleston.
She recalled how she had felt as a child when her father was racially profiled: Two police officers showed up at a produce stand and watched him until he paid.
“That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain,” she said. “I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.”
At the same time, she has used her platform and identity to argue that the United States is not systemically racist.
“That is a lie. America is not a racist country,” she said at the Republican National Convention in 2020. “This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They came to America and settled in a small Southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate.”
The governorship
Haley, who began her political career as a state representative, was initially elected governor by what was a narrow margin for a state as staunchly Republican as South Carolina: 51 per cent to 47 per cent for her Democratic opponent. She more than tripled that margin when she was reelected in 2014.
In her first year in office, Haley signed a bill cracking down on illegal immigration, including by establishing a new law enforcement unit and requiring police officers to check the immigration status of people they stopped or arrested if they suspected they might be in the country illegally.
In 2014, she signed a bill that redistributed education funding to districts with the highest poverty levels and provided money for reading coaches in schools.
Haley also made South Carolina the second state to drop the Common Core education standards because, she said, “We don’t ever want to educate South Carolina children like they educate California children.”
The Confederate flag
In 2015, three weeks after a white man killed nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Haley signed a bill to remove the Confederate battle flag — the military emblem of the South’s fight to preserve slavery — from the South Carolina House.
The flag was lowered the next day, and Haley’s national profile soared.
Haley first called for the flag’s removal five days after the church massacre. “We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer,” she said. “The fact that people are choosing to use it as a sign of hate is something we cannot stand. The fact that it causes pain to so many is enough to move it from the Capitol grounds. It is, after all, a Capitol that belongs to all of us.”
In the same speech, she took pains to say that, to many South Carolinians, the flag was “a symbol of respect, integrity and duty” and “a way to honour ancestors who came to the service of their state” — and that there was no need for the state to decide who was right: the people who saw it that way or those who saw it as “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.”
When she said the same thing in 2019, there was a much fiercer backlash to her assertion that the flag was not inherently racist, a sign of a political and social shift that she denounced in an opinion essay.
The UN ambassadorship
After President Donald Trump chose her as his ambassador to the United Nations, Haley was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate, 96-4. She would serve in that role for about two years before resigning at the end of 2018.
At the United Nations, Haley was a face of the Trump administration’s policies on Israel, North Korea, Russia and Syria.
She accused the UN of “bullying” Israel for its treatment of Palestinians and called for the United States to move its Israeli Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. She supported sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear program and pushed hard for the decertification of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.
But she was not always aligned with the president she served under.
In one tense episode, Haley announced that the Trump administration would impose sanctions on Russia over its support for a Syrian government that was using chemical weapons against civilians — only for the White House to announce that it would not do so after all, suggesting that Haley had been confused about the policy.
“I don’t get confused,” she responded tersely.
Despite the internal conflicts, Haley maintained a high public approval rating throughout her time as ambassador, as she had during her governorship. In April 2018, when Trump’s approval rating was in the high 30s and low 40s, Haley’s was more than 60 per cent. (Such strength over Trump is not apparent in early polls of the 2024 race.)
Learning to love Trump
Haley denounced Trump during the 2016 Republican primary race, describing him as “everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten.” (She endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.) She criticized Trump for his immigration policies and, particularly forcefully, for choosing “not to disavow the KKK.”
Then Trump was elected, and like many other Republicans who had opposed him, Haley changed her tune.
She agreed to serve in his administration while staying restrained in her comments — not praising Trump, per se, but saying that his election showed he had connected with American voters and that Republicans needed to adapt accordingly. Over time, she became more enthusiastic.
And while she condemned Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol — saying, “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history” — she quickly pivoted to cast him as a victim once the House filed impeachment charges.
“They beat him up before he got into office, and they’re beating him up after he leaves office,” she said. “I mean, at some point, give the man a break.”
In April 2021, she said she would not run for president in 2024 if Trump did.
Sometime between then and now, she changed her mind.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maggie Astor
Photographs by: Taylor Glascock
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
