Donald Trump goes back to birtherism in attack on Nikki Haley

On Tuesday, Donald Trump reposted a story from the infamously unreliable right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit. According to that post, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is ineligible to be president or vice president because “her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth in 1972.”

This story is an obvious echo of the claims Trump made about President Barack Obama from before the 2008 election right up until 2016. Trump regularly repeated lies that Obama had been born in Kenya and repeatedly insisted that Obama produce his long-form birth certificate. When Obama did release the certificate, Trump declared it was a fake. In 2015, Trump even claimed that he had sent investigators to Hawaii and that those investigators had collected “absolutely unbelievable” evidence of how Obama’s parents had faked his birth certificate. Because somehow they knew their son would be running for president 47 years later.

Trump repeating the claim that Haley is ineligible is, at its core, a reflection of the racism that dominates everything Trump does and says. Trump did the same thing in 2020 in supporting a racist Newsweek editorial claiming that Kamala Harris wasn’t eligible to be vice president.

But there’s more to this than just the simple racism Trump is slinging at candidates of color. This is an expression of the racist, anti-immigrant policies that Trump adores and the right has adopted.