Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley won her first Primary victory, but will she really be the woman to take down Donald Trump? (Picture: Metro/Reuters)
When you’re running against Donald Trump, you’ve got to prepare yourself for some pretty lowball insults.
Nikki Haley – the last person standing against the businessman-turned-politician in the Republican race to find its next presidential candidate – has weathered a number of taunts from her rival.
He’s called her ‘birdbrain’, attacked her husband, and now he’s named her ‘Queen of the Swamp’.
Haley won the Republican primary in Washington DC on Sunday – marking her first victory in the presidential race and making her the first woman to win a Republican primary in US history.
In response to the defeat, Trump’s press team said that Haley was ‘crowned Queen of the Swamp’, adding that the former Apprentice boss will ‘drain the swamp and put America first’.
It’s not the first time that Trump has thrown around the term ‘swamp’ – but what does it actually mean?
Why did Trump call Haley the ‘Queen of the Swamp’?
Haley’s home state of South Carolina may be famous for its wetlands – it’s even home to the charmingly-named Hell Hole Swamp – but Trump’s dig at his rival is a reference to bureaucracy in Washington DC.
The term ‘swamp’ is used in American politics to refer to lobbyists and industry insiders who try to gain political influence in the US capital.
It was first used by Social Democrat politician Winfield E. Gaylord in 1903, and was later popularised by Republican President Ronald Reagan.
In 1980 Reagan said he wanted to ‘drain the swamp’ when he launched a series of measures to cut waste and inefficiencies in government.
Swamps are drained to kill mosquitos and keep malaria at bay.
Haley was a part of the Trump administration until 2018 (Picture Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)
And Trump is particularly fond of the phrase. In his 2016 presidential campaign, he said that foreign lobbyists were interfering in US politics and he would ‘drain the swamp’ to get rid of them.
In the run up to the 2016 election, he tweeted ‘Drain the swamp’ 79 times in three weeks.
In his current campaign, he’s used the phrase to refer to Washington DC more generally. He blamed the ‘swamp’ for Haley’s victory on Sunday.
‘I purposely stayed away from the DC Vote because it is the ‘Swamp,’ with very few delegates, and no upside,’ he said in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform.
Perhaps his vitriol is unsurprising. Trump hasn’t fared well in Washington DC in the past. In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden claimed 92% of the vote in the district.
Who is Nikki Haley?
The former governor of South Carolina launched her campaign to become President of the United States in February 2023.
Other Republican candidates, including Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswarmy, dropped out of the race, leaving Haley and Trump to battle it out in the primaries.
What are primaries?
In the US, primaries take place in each state before each party officially chooses its candidate for the presidential election.
Voting eligibility varies from state to state. In some primaries, only those registered with a party can vote.
Once the primaries have taken place, both parties hold their conventions and formally announce the candidate with the most delegate support.
Born in 1972, Haley’s parents emigrated from India to Canada, and later moved to the US when her father got a job as a biology professor at a university in South Carolina. They were the only Indian family in their small town.
Haley has said she was ‘proud’ to be the daughter of Indian immigrants.
‘We faced discrimination and hardship, but my parents never gave in to grievance and hate,’ she said in a speech.
Haley leaves with her mother Raj, son Nalin, daughter Rena and Rena’s husband Joshua, after casting her vote in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary election earlier this year (Picture: Reuters/Brian Snyder)
Haley’s mother ran a clothes boutique, and from the age of 12, the future politician spent her free time working there as a bookkeeper.
She went on to study accounting and finance at college. After an early career in business, Haley’s first foray into politics was in 2004, when she ran for the South Carolina House of Representatives and won, becoming the first Indian American to hold the role.
She was the governor of South Carolina from 2011 until 2017, and then spent two years as the United States ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration.
When she resigned from the UN role, she called Trump a ‘friend’ and said she would not apologise for working with him.
After leaving the UN role in 2018, Haley spent a year on the board of directors at Boeing.
Haley’s husband Michael serves in the US military (Picture: AP)
Her husband, Michael Haley, is a major in the South Carolina National Guard.
When the pair first met, he was known as Bill, but Haley decided to call him by his middle name because he didn’t ‘look like a Bill’.
‘From that point on, I started calling him Michael, and all my friends did the same,’ she revealed in her 2012 book Can’t is Not an Option.
The couple had a Sikh and a Christian ceremony to celebrate their marriage in 1996.
In February, Trump questioned why Michael wasn’t attending political events. The attempt backfired – at the time, Haley’s husband was on military deployment. Haley called the comments ‘unhinged’.
The couple have two children, Rena, a nurse at a children’s hospital, and Nalin, a senior in college.
Both Haley’s children have accompanied her on the campaign trail, with Nalin frequently taking to Twitter to defend his mum.
Haley’s children Nalin and Rena have joined her on the campaign trail (Picture: Reuters/Brian Snyder)
He called US politician Tim Scott ‘Senator Judas’ after he endorsed Trump, and compared former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy to Pennywise, the clown in ‘It’.
Nalin even made a sarcastic reference to Trump’s swamp obsession in a tweet in the run up to the Washington primary.
Will Nikki Haley beat Trump?
Haley’s victory in Washington DC may not be enough to beat her political rival, as she has lost every other primary so far. She even lost in her home state of South Carolina.
Her last hope is Super Tuesday, which takes place on 5 March.
Sixteen US states will hold primaries, making it the biggest day of voting in the country before the November election.
Both Democrats and Republicans will vote for their preferred presidential candidate. Many political pundits think that there’s only one likely outcome – a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden.