Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley said during her appearance on Fox News that former President Trump uses nicknames for her because “he feels insecure” about her rise in the GOP primary as his biggest challenger.
Fox News’s Neil Cavuto asked the former U.N. ambassador Saturday if she interprets Trump mocking her given first name as a “racial zinger.”
Haley, who served in Trump’s administration, said that politics is not “personal” to her and did not dispute them as a racial attack, but added that Trump is doing it because he feels “threatened.”
“Politics is not personal for me. It’s what he does,” Haley responded on Cavuto Live. “This is what he does when he feels insecure. This is what he does when he feels threatened. I worked with him. I know exactly how he is.”
In another example of the former president focusing on his opponent’s race and ethnicity, Trump went after her in his post on TruthSocial on Friday, mocking Haley’s birth name, repeatedly calling her “Nimbra.”
“Governor Chris Sununu, the now failing Governor of New Hampshire, where I am beating his endorsed candidate, Nimbra, by big numbers, and DeSanctimonious by even bigger numbers, should spend more time keeping Democrats from voting in the Republican Primary – How ridiculous is that,” Trump said in a post on Friday.
Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, was born in South Carolina as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, but has always gone by her middle name, “Nikki.”
Later during the Fox News interview on Saturday, Cavuto asked her if Trump was doing the same thing while she was in his administration.
Haley denied it, saying that he praised the former South Carolina governor for doing a “great job” and keeping “America strong.”
“No, because he thought I did a great job,” Haley said. “And he said I was tough. And he said that I was the best U.N. ambassador they ever had. And he always told everybody, don’t mess with me, you know, because, you know, she’s a killer. She’s going to make sure that she keeps America strong. He praised me constantly and we had that.”