GILBERT, S.C.—Speaking in a barn in the legislative district where she got her political start, Nikki Haley, former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor, said the nation needs to get its fiscal house in order.
“Now I’m going to tell you like I told you when I was your governor. No more whining about it. No more complaining about it. Now we get to work,” she told an appreciative crowd of about 400 people.
And that work, she said, will include reforming entitlements.
“Social Security will be bankrupt in 10 years. Medicare will be bankrupt in five,” she said.
“We will do entitlement reform the way you do entitlement reform,” Haley said. “You don’t touch anybody that’s given in. You don’t take from anybody that’s been promised. My parents are in their 80s. We take care of them. I don’t want anybody bothering theirs.”
“But my kids are in their 20s. We go to them and we say, ‘The rules have changed for you.’ We change their benefits to where it reflects life expectancy. We say ... we are going to limit what is given to the wealthy. We’re going to expand Medicare Advantage Plan.”
She summed up the domestic scene the way many folks see it.
“You don’t even have to look at the news but you feel how bad everything is. You feel it at the grocery store. You feel it in our schools. You feel it when you’re walking around. You see it when you look at the banking system. It’s bad.”
“So I’m running for president because when I look at all of that, something has to give. We are $31 trillion in debt. We are borrowing money just to make interest payments and the spending is out of control.”
And she didn’t hesitate to include her party as one of the responsible ones.
“It’s easy for us to blame [President Joe] Biden. But I’ve always been a truth-teller to you and I’ve always told you the truth even when it hurts. Our Republicans did that to us too.
“You go back and you look at that Covid stimulus bill with no accountability whatsoever—$2.2 trillion that they passed that expanded welfare. We now have 90 million Americans on Medicaid. Forty-two million Americans on food stamps.”
“And look at what they did. They paid people to sit on the couch.”
She faulted Republicans for reopening the use of earmarks for the first time in 10 years. She ticked off millions that have gone to local projects like horse racing in Arizona, an honors college in Vermont, and a courthouse in Colorado.
“That’s not how you want your money spent. That’s not how I want my money spent.”
“They say Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on anything. They do agree on wasting our money. They have no problem doing that.”
Haley brought that theme to her analysis of foreign affairs, with the perspective her two years as the Trump administration’s UN ambassador has given her.
She supports Ukraine, admires the courage with which the Ukrainians have fought against the Russian invasion, and thinks the United States should do what it can—short of boots on the ground—to support it with money and arms.
She added that Ukraine had been one of the United States’ most loyal allies in the UN.
That can’t be said of countless countries worldwide that receive American assistance while opposing us in the United Nations, Haley said.
She told a story about her UN tenure:
“When we moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, we were condemned by the world. I was so mad because America can put its embassy anywhere we want.”
It’s always in the host nation’s capital, and Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, she said.
“But on that day, 128 countries voted against us.”
She went back to her office and told her staff, she said, to make a book: to list all the UN member nations, the percentage of times they voted with or against the United States, and how much U.S. aid they get.
“I took that book and I gave it to President Trump. And he lost his mind. And I said to him, ‘I’m not saying you give foreign aid based on a percentage vote, but that should be one of the things we look at.’”
Haley was forthright about who she considers American adversaries: Russia, Iran, North Korea, and, most of all, China.
She noted some recipients of foreign aid:
“They gave it to Pakistan, who harbored terrorists that tried to kill our soldiers. They gave it to Iraq who’s infiltrated now with Iranians who say ‘Death to America.’ They gave it to Zimbabwe, the most anti-American African country. They gave it to Belarus, who’s holding hands with Russia in the fight against Ukraine. They gave it to communist Cuba, who we said was a sponsor of terrorism. And yes, are you ready, they gave money to China.”
“We will stop paying money to countries that hate America.”
Other budget-balancing measures she advocated included clawing back hundreds of billions of dollars in unspent Covid relief money, going after Covid money spent fraudulently, firing the 87,000 new IRS agents the Biden administration is hiring, and stopping welfare program payments to illegal immigrants.
“I had to balance a budget as your governor in South Carolina. You’ve got to balance the budget at home. You have to balance [the budget] in your businesses. There is no reason Congress can’t balance a budget.”
“Your families don’t deserve what you’re dealing with right now. But the way we will fix it is when you send a badass Republican woman to the White House.”
Haley addressed other issues Republicans warm to, including supporting the police, facing the Chinese threat, instituting voter ID, fighting illegal immigration, being pro-life, transgenders competing in women’s sports, and what’s taught as “sex education” in elementary schools.
She alluded to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, called by some the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
“It basically said you couldn’t talk about gender before 3rd grade. When I was in school, you didn’t have sex ed until 7th grade. And even then you had to have a permission slip signed by your parents, and my dad wouldn’t sign it. So I was the uncool kid in the classroom next door.”
Teachers shouldn’t be stuck with this task anyway, she said. They “have enough on their plate. They should be teaching reading and writing, and math, and science, and history.”
“Bureaucrats do not get to parent our kids. That’s more unsettling. That’s for us to talk about.”
Haley—one of three declared candidates for the Republican nomination—is way down in the polls.
The most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls, for the two weeks ending April 3, had her at 4.5 percent—behind Trump at 50.8 percent. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 24.6 percent, and former Vice President Mike Pence at 5.0 percent.
Neither DeSantis nor Pence has declared candidacy.
She’s been in that position before, she said.
“When I ran for governor I ran against a lieutenant governor, an attorney general, a very popular Congressman, and a state senator. I was ‘Nikki Who?’ I had 3 percent in the polls, and I had the least amount of money. I worked this state like no one else and you invested in me and we won.”
Don’t underestimate her, said some of the listeners in the crowd.
“She’s tough-skinned and won’t back down. She’s not afraid of Trump. She doesn’t have a whole lot to hide. She’s very forthcoming,” said Rick Winfield, a disabled Navy vet and retired paralegal there with his wife, Donna.
Winfield said he knew Haley in the business community of nearby Lexington before she ran for office. “If you have a problem, go straight at it. She doesn’t play political games like others do.”
“She’s genuine,’ said Marsha Gunter, who listened with her friend Shannon Amick. Both are nurses in Lexington. “She’s tough. She’ll definitely stand her ground.”
Both saw Trump speak at the same property in 2015 before the barn was built. Gunter recalled that Trump spoke in a tent at the site. Haley’s speech was held at The Groves on Augusta, a venue on a rural stretch of U.S. 1 used for events such as weddings and political speeches.
Amick predicted Haley would win the South Carolina primary against him.
Steve Senf, a retired state employee from Gilbert who came with his son Carter, 17, said he came to hear what Haley had to say and had been going to hear presidential candidates for years.
Senf saw Mitt Romney speak on the same property, he said. He thought Haley ran a good state government when he worked for it.
“She was responsible. Not divisive. I like how she rallied our state together during times of crisis,” the kinds of crises that might send other cities or states into chaos, Senf said.
Senf was thinking, he said, of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church shooting in Charleston, in which Dylann Roof was convicted of killing nine black church members in 2015.
Roof was sentenced to death in federal court and life imprisonment without parole in state courts for the murders.
Haley only mentioned Trump, her former boss, by name when she told the UN story. She was implicitly critical of his fiscal handling of the early Covid pandemic.
And, in a week when the former president was indicted in New York, she talked about why she’d be the right candidate now.
“We are going to have to have a new generation of leader,” Haley said. “We’re going to have to leave the baggage and the status quo with the drama of the past. And we’re going to have to focus on what it really takes to win.”
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