Former President Donald Trump claims GOP rival Nikki Haley isn’t eligible to be president because she is the daughter of immigrants, reports NBC.
The allegations against the GOP rival who is a U.S. citizen born in South Carolina comes as she comes within 7 percentage points of Trump in a recent CNN/University of New Hampshire poll.
Trump also made similar birther arguments against two other minority politicians in previous campaigns. He falsely claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to run for president. He later made birther arguments against Ted Cruz.
“Trump’s mind hits rewind whenever he feels backed into a corner, repeating the same old attacks at higher volume,” said CNN political analyst John Avlon. “This specious claim flies in the face of the 14th amendment, which says people born in the US are automatically citizens.”
Yet Trump seems to think that children of immigrants don’t have the same rights as other citizens.
“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe said to NBC in an email. “I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of color — and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”
Trump has clearly turned his attention to Haley and sees her as his chief political rival for the GOP nomination, and not Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
“President Trump has always said that he’s going to train his sights on whoever is in second place,” Trump senior adviser Jason Miller told CNN. “Now as [DeSantis] plummets towards single digits … Nikki Haley just happens to be in second place.”
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