Donald Trump, the chief propagator of false “birther” claims first against then-President Barack Obama and later against Sen. Ted Cruz, has a new target: Nikki Haley.
As Haley surges in New Hampshire polling, Trump posted an article on his Truth Social account from a right-wing outlet that claimed Haley, his GOP rival, is ineligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.
Haley was born in South Carolina and has lived in the U.S. her entire life. Her parents were immigrants, who became citizens after her birth in 1972.
“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote 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.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
DES MOINES, Iowa — Donald Trump, the chief propagator of false “birther” claims first against then-President Barack Obama and later against Sen. Ted Cruz, has a new target: Nikki Haley.
“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote 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.”
“Someone should tell him [Trump] that the North won” the Civil War, joked Burt Neuborne, a professor emeritus at New York University Law School and the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, an MSNBC columnist, called Trump’s suggestion that Haley is ineligible “offensive” but also noted that it could be an issue that eventually makes its way to the courts more fully.
But nonetheless, the question of the term ‘natural born citizen’ has not been fully fleshed out in the courts, and it may be that Trump is relegating us to more meaningless discourse in this area just like he did with the birther lies about Obama.”
The original article contains 735 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!