ATLANTA (AP) \u2014 Donald Trump used his social media platform Friday to mock Nikki Haley\u2019s birth name, the latest example of the former president keying on race and ethnicity to attack people of color, especially his political rivals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as \u201cNimbra.\u201d Haley, the former South Carolina governor, was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has always gone by her middle name, \u201cNikki.\u201d She took the surname \u201cHaley\u201d upon her marriage in 1996.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump, himself the son, grandson and twice the husband of immigrants, called Haley \u201cNimbra\u201d three times in the post and said she \u201cdoesn\u2019t have what it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The attack comes four days before the New Hampshire primary, in which Haley is trying to establish herself as the only viable Trump alternative in the Republicans\u2019 2024 nominating contest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s post was an escalation of recent attacks in which he referenced Haley\u2019s given first name \u2014 though he\u2019s misspelled it \u201cNimrada\u201d \u2014 and falsely asserted she is ineligible for the presidency because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born in 1972.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The attacks echo Trump\u2019s \u201cbirther\u201d rhetoric against President Barack Obama. Trump spent years pushing the conspiracy theory that the nation\u2019s first Black president was born in Kenya and not a \u201cnatural born\u201d U.S. citizen as required by the Constitution. That effort was part of Trump\u2019s rise among Republicans\u2019 most culturally conservative base ahead of his 2016 election that surprised much of the U.S. political establishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Haley has dismissed Trump\u2019s latest attacks as proof that she threatens his bid for a third consecutive nomination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ll let people decide what he means by his attacks,\u201d Haley told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday when asked about Trump\u2019s false assertions that her heritage disqualifies her from the Oval Office. \u201cWhat we know is, look, he\u2019s clearly insecure if he goes and does these temper tantrums, if he\u2019s spending millions of dollars on TV. He\u2019s insecure, he knows that something\u2019s wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s campaign did not immediately reply to an inquiry about his comments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since Monday\u2019s Iowa caucuses \u2014 which Trump won by 30 points over Ron DeSantis, who placed second \u2014 Haley has aimed to portray the rest of the GOP primary battle as a two-way race between Trump and herself despite her narrow third-place finish. Haley\u2019s campaign is aiming for a stronger showing in New Hampshire, hoping for a springboard into her home-state South Carolina, which holds the South\u2019s first presidential primary next month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For his part, Trump bounces between declarations that the nominating fight already is effectively over and blasting Haley as if the two are indeed locked in a tight contest. Trump still criticizes his other remaining rival, DeSantis, but his preferred pejoratives for the Florida governor, \u201cRon DeSanctimonious\u201d or \u201cRon DeSanctus,\u201d has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. DeSantis is white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s focus on Haley\u2019s name comes as far-right online forums have for months been littered with mentions of her given name alongside racist commentary and false \u201cbirther\u201d claims. Haley\u2019s name and family background also have become talking points on the left. Some widely circulating social media posts have called her a hypocrite for saying America was \u201cnever a racist country\u201d when she likely experienced racism herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pastor Darrell Scott, a Black man who has led a diversity coalition for Trump\u2019s previous campaigns, defended the former president\u2019s latest attacks as \u201cslings and arrows\u201d that come in election season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou have to dissect politics as politics. It\u2019s not personal,\u201d said Scott. \u201cHe\u2019s not intending to demean her or degrade her in any way. He\u2019s just doing that to garner votes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scott said Trump \u201chas a compassionate side that most people don\u2019t see\u201d and defended his aggressive approach as a \u201cgoose-and-gander situation\u201d for a public figure constantly \u201cunder attack for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tara Setmayer, senior adviser to the Lincoln Project group that opposes Trump from within the conservative movement, agreed that Trump\u2019s rhetoric works in a Republican primary. But she said that\u2019s a damning reality for the party and does not excuse his behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese are the rantings of an incredibly, almost pathetically insecure man who has demonstrated over his entire career his racism and bigotry,\u201d said Setmayer, who is multiracial and calls herself a former Republican and now a conservative independent. \u201cWhy would anyone expect it to be any different now, when an entire political party has enabled this level of morally questionable behavior?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amid the fallout Friday, Trump won the endorsement of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate\u2019s only Black Republican and formerly a presidential candidate himself. Haley appointed Scott to the Senate in 2012, during her first term as governor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump has a long history of using race, ethnicity and immigrant heritage as a cudgel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For years, he has referred to Obama as \u201cBarack Hussein Obama,\u201d putting an obvious emphasis on the 44th president\u2019s middle name. Obama was the son of an white American mother and a Black father from Kenya. He was born in Hawaii, though Trump spent years asserting Obama had manufactured the story and a birth certificate to support it. Trump eventually admitted his claims were false but then, during the 2016 general election, said he did so only to \u201cget on with the campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, encouraged Republican primary voters to back Trump in 2016, Trump responded in a CNN interview that he knew \u201cnothing about David Duke, I know nothing about white supremacists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump is also among many Republicans who deliberately mispronounce Vice President Kamala Harris\u2019 name. Rather than the correct \u201cKA\u2019-ma-la,\u201d Trump sometimes says, \u201cKa-MAH-la.\u201d Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, is the first woman to become vice president and the third non-white person as either president or vice president, following Obama and Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover\u2019s vice president, who had Native American ancestry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leading up to Trump\u2019s 2017 inauguration, civil rights icon John Lewis, a Black man and at the time a congressman from Georgia, said he would not attend Trump\u2019s inauguration because he considered him an illegitimate president. Trump reacted by\u00a0blasting Lewis\u2019s Atlanta-based district\u00a0as being in \u201chorrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).\u201d The district includes downtown Atlanta, Coca-Cola\u2019s world headquarters, the Georgia Institute of Technology and principal sites of the 1996 Olympic Games, among other attributes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump also has said that four congresswomen of color should go back to the \u201cbroken and crime infested\u201d countries they came from, ignoring the fact that all of the women are American citizens and three were born in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod in Scotland and came to the United States between the two world wars. His paternal grandfather, Frederick Trump, was a Bavarian-born immigrant from Germany in the 1880s. Trump\u2019s first wife, Ivana Zeln\u00ed\u010dkov\u00e1 before their marriage, was born in what is now the Czech Republic. His third wife, former first lady Melania Trump, was born Melanija Knavs in what is now Slovenia. That means four of Trump\u2019s five children also are children of immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Haley frames her family\u2019s story as proof that the U.S. \u201cis not a racist country.\u201d She sometimes highlights her role in taking down the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina statehouse grounds after a racist massacre in her state \u2014 though she had sidestepped requests to remove the banner earlier in her term. And Haley has for years navigated Trump\u2019s penchant for racist rhetoric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,\u201d Haley said during the 2016 primary campaign, after she had endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio over Trump. \u201cThat is not a part of our party; that is not who we want as president.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n