Donald Trump used his social media platform on Friday to mock Nikki Haley’s birth name, the latest example of the former president using race and ethnicity to attack people of color, especially his political rivals.

In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as Nimbra. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, was born in Bamberg,

SC, South Carolina,

as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has always gone by her middle name, Nikki. Upon her marriage in 1996, she adopted the surname Haley.

Trump called Haley Nimbra three times by mail and said she doesn’t have what it takes.

The attack comes four days before the New Hampshire primary, in which Haley is trying to position himself as the only viable Trump alternative in the Republicans’ 2024 nominating contest.

Trump’s post was an escalation of recent attacks in which he referred to Haley’s first name, though he missed Nimrada and falsely claimed she was ineligible to run for president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born in 1972 born.

The attacks echo Trump’s birther rhetoric against President Barack Obama. Trump has for years promoted the conspiracy theory that the country’s first black president was born in Kenya

What

not a natural born American citizen as required by the Constitution. That effort was part of Trump’s rise among Republicans’ most culturally conservative base ahead of his 2016 election, which surprised much of the U.S. political establishment.

Haley has dismissed Trump’s latest attacks as evidence that she is threatening his bid for a third consecutive nomination.

I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks, Haley told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday when asked about Trump’s false claims that her race disqualifies her from the Oval Office. What we know is that he’s clearly insecure if he’s going to throw these tantrums, if he’s spending millions of dollars on TV. He is insecure, he knows something is wrong.

Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to an inquiry about his comments.

Since Monday’s Iowa caucuses, which Trump won by 30 points over second-place Ron DeSantis, Haley has aimed to portray the rest of the GOP primaries as a two-way race between Trump and herself, despite her close third-place finish . Haley’s campaign is focused on a stronger showing in New Hampshire, hoping for a springboard to her home

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state of South Carolina, where the South’s first presidential primaries will be held next month.

In turn, Trump bounces between declarations that the nomination battle is already effectively over, and shoots Haley as if the two are indeed in a close battle. Trump still criticizes his other remaining rival, DeSantis, but his favorite pejoratives for Florida governor Ron DeSanctimonious or Ron DeSanctus have nothing to do with race or ethnicity. DeSantis is white.

Trump’s focus on Haley’s name comes as far-right online forums have been littered for months with mentions of her first name, alongside racist comments and false claims of birth. Haley’s name and family background have also become topics of conversation on the left. Some widely shared social media posts have called her a hypocrite for saying America has never been a racist country, even though she has likely experienced racism herself.

Pastor Darrell Scott, a Black man who led a diversity coalition during Trump’s previous campaigns, defended the former president’s latest attacks as slings and arrows common to election season.

You have to analyze politics as politics. It’s not personal, Scott said. He has no intention of humiliating her or degrading her in any way. He only does that to win votes.

Scott said Trump has a compassionate side that most people don’t see and defended his aggressive approach as a goose-and-goose situation for a public figure who is constantly attacked for everything.

Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project group that opposes Trump from within the conservative movement, agreed that Trump’s rhetoric is working in a Republican primary. But she said this is a devastating reality for the party and does not excuse his behavior.

These are the rants of an incredibly, almost pathetically insecure man who has demonstrated his racism and bigotry throughout his career, said Setmayer, who is multiracial and calls himself a former Republican and now a conservative independent. Why would anyone expect things to be any different now, when an entire political party has enabled this level of morally questionable behavior?

Amid the fallout Friday, Trump received the support of Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only black Republican and a former presidential candidate himself. Haley appointed Scott to the Senate in 2012, during her first term as governor. Trump has a long history of using race, ethnicity and immigrant heritage as a cudgel.

For years, he referred to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama, placing a clear emphasis on the 44th president’s middle name. Obama was the son of a white American mother and a black father from Kenya. He was born in Hawaii, although Trump claimed for years that Obama had fabricated the story and a birth certificate to support it. Trump eventually admitted his claims were false, but said during the 2016 general election that he only did so to continue the campaign.

When David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, encouraged the 2016 Republican primary to support Trump, Trump responded in a CNN interview that he knew nothing about David Duke, I don’t know anything about white supremacists.

Trump is also one of many Republicans who deliberately mispronounced Vice President Kamala Harris’ words.

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Last name. Instead of the correct KA’-ma-la, Trump sometimes says: Ka-MAH-la. Harris, of Indian and Jamaican descent, is the first woman to become vice president and the second non-white person to serve as president or vice president, after Obama.

Ahead of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, civil rights icon John Lewis, then a black congressman from Georgia, said he would not attend Trump’s inauguration because he considered him an illegitimate president. Trump responded by labeling Lewis’s Atlanta-based district as being in terrible shape and in disrepair (not to mention crime-ridden). The district includes downtown Atlanta, Coca-Cola’s world headquarters, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the major sites of the 1996 Olympic Games.

During his presidency, Trump asked during a meeting with lawmakers why the US would accept immigrants from Haiti and shithole countries across Africa instead of countries like Norway. He did not explicitly mention race, but the White House followed the disclosure of his comments with a statement explaining that Trump supported allowing entry into the US for those who can contribute to our society.

He has also said that four congressional women of color should go back to the broken and crime-ridden countries they came from, ignoring the fact that all of the women are U.S. citizens and three were born in the U.S.

Trump himself is the grandson of a Bavarian-born German immigrant, Frederick Trump.

Haley sees her family’s story as proof that the US is not a racist country. She sometimes emphasizes her role in taking down the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds after a racist massacre in her state, even though she had sidestepped requests to remove the banner earlier in her term. And Haley has been able to sidestep Trump’s penchant for racist rhetoric for years.

“I will not stop until we fight a man who chooses not to disavow the KKK,” Haley said during the 2016 primaries after voicing her support.

Florida

Senator Marco Rubio

(R-Fla.)

over Trump. That is not part of our party; That’s not who we want as president.