NIKKI HALEY'S MOMENT

The former South Carolina governor finds momentum in a GOP primary that remains Trump’s to lose

- PHILIP ELLIOTT

NIKKI HALEY HAD HEARD WORSE THAN THE snipes from one of the three men standing to her left onstage. As a candidate for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she was attacked with anti-Indian-American slurs. Three years later, the state Democratic Party chairman said she should go "back to wherever the hell she came from," ignoring that she was born in South Carolina's Bamberg County Hospital. When she was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., the Secretary of State allegedly deployed sexist words that begin with a B and a C. To her face.

But in Miami on Nov. 8, when the presidential candidate found her daughter's social media usage a topic at the third debate of second-tier GOP contenders, Haley stood on the verge of boiling over. "Leave my daughter out of your voice," Haley told tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy, who had just brought up Rena Haley's TikTok. "You're just scum," she added later; her daughter watched from the room.