Tuesday, on the heels of her third-place finish in Iowa a night earlier, former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, reacted to comments from MSNBC host Joy Reid claiming a “brown lady” could not be the nominee of the GOP with Donald Trump still around.
“The elephant in the room, she’s still a brown lady that’s got to try to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant,” Reid said during MSNBC’s coverage of the Iowa caucus outcome. “It’s still a challenge. I don’t see how she becomes the nominee of that party with Donald Trump still around. I can’t picture it happening. Maybe it could happen. Ron DeSantis’ only argument for staying in it, is he’s the white guy that he can still make the appeal to white people.”
Haley rejected Reid’s analysis.
“First of all, I mean, Joy Reid lives in a different American than I do,” Haley said. “I mean, yes, I’m a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a U.N. Ambassador and who is now running for president. If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is. You can sit there and give me all the reasons why you think I can’t do this. I will continue to defy everybody on why we can do this. And we will get it done.”
“Are you a racist party?” “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade asked. “Are you involved in a racist party?”
“No, we’re not a racist country, Brian,” Haley replied. “We’ve never been a racist country. Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can. I know, I faced racism when I was growing up.”
“But I can tell you, today is a lot better than it was then,” she continued. “Our goal is to lift up everybody, not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else. We’ve had enough of that in America. That’s why I’m so passionate about doing this. I don’t want my kids growing up where they’re sitting there thinking that they’re disadvantaged because of a color a or a gender. I want them to know that if they work hard they can do and be anything they want to be in America.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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