CLAY: We have had breaking news as another member of the Republican Party has entered into the race. She is Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Donald Trump. She joins us now. And I have to say, I feel like you’re in your prime. Am I crazy or is that a valid assignation there?

GOV. HALEY: You are a very smart man. Yes, I am. And I will tell you, you know, Don Lemon made a name for himself because I think he showed why maybe sexist male anchors on CNN need mental competency tests, too.

Nikki Haley responds to Don Lemon’s comment that she’s past her ‘prime’: Liberals ‘are the most sexist” https://t.co/rLSzF23kRt

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 17, 2023

CLAY: So, I want to dive into that a little bit. I know there’s obviously a ton that we can we can go into. But where were you when you heard that Don Lemon on CNN had said that you were outside of your prime because you weren’t in your twenties and thirties and forties as he had Googled? And did you immediately just think… Because when we played this clip, I was like, “This is the greatest gift that CNN could have given Nikki Haley to have someone that dumb say something that idiotic.” It just felt like they were trying to help your candidacy, almost.

GOV. HALEY: Look, I had just gotten to New Hampshire, and I’ll tell you this. I was not surprised. If you saw Whoopi Goldberg hit me the day before, I had faced this all my life. Any time I surface to do anything, the liberals heads explode. It always has happened. They can’t stand that a conservative minority female would be… you know, is not a Democrat. They just can’t take it. And they have pushed back on me because they know I pull in independents, they know I pull in suburban women, they know I pull in minorities, and they know what I say is right and true.

And so they immediately start attacking. This won’t be the first or the last. It didn’t faze me at all because there will be more. And, you know, it’s funny how liberals say they’re pro-women, but then you hear sexist remarks like this. It’s funny how liberals say, you know, that Republicans are the ones that are racist, but they’re the ones that are quick to have racist comments about me. But, you know, even when I became governor in South Carolina, it was a liberal Democrat that said, “She’s not a minority. She’s just a conservative with a tan.” I mean, so this is nothing new. It rolls off my back. Their heads are exploding and that’s okay. It shows the threat that I am and I’ll take it.

Liberals can’t stand the idea of having competency tests for older politicians to make sure they can do the job.

BTW it’s always the liberals who are the most sexist. pic.twitter.com/PzpniQFLff

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 16, 2023

CLAY: For people who aren’t familiar with your story. Take us into growing up in South Carolina, what that was like, what your unique experience was. You say you’re a brown girl in a white and black state, which, you know, I think a lot of people have not experienced it, although there are increasing Asian populations all over the Southeast. In the early seventies, that wasn’t necessarily the case for you. What was that experience like?

GOV. HALEY: You know, I grew up in a rural town in South Carolina, population 2500. Two stoplights. You couldn’t think about doing something wrong without telling your mom. But we were the only Indian family, and we weren’t white enough to be white. We weren’t black enough to be black. Times were hard. They didn’t know who we were, what we were, why we were there. And when I would get teased on the playground, my mom would always say, “Your job is not to show them how you’re different. Your job is to show them how you’re similar.”

And, you know, even though they didn’t know who or what we were or why we were there, my parents knew. Because my parents knew that I had been born in the best country in the world, and they knew that this country was an opportunity for their children to have a better life than they did. And so they always told my brothers, my sister and me every day that even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America. I grew up. That same state that didn’t understand us, grew to elect me the first minority female governor in America. And it goes to show that, you know, when these liberals say that “America is rotten” and that “America is no good” and then “America is racist,” I am proof of all of that, that it’s not. And so, yeah, you know. Go ahead, please.

CLAY: No, no. I was just going to say, I think that’s well said. And to your point, this is a really hard thing for Democrats to respond to. But if America is so fundamentally racist, how come so many minorities are literally willing to die to get here? That is incongruous, right? And it is a really difficult question for them to answer. And they don’t seem to be able to do it. And that’s why I think, frankly, they’re so threatened by your rise in the Republican Party in general, because it attacked so many integral elements of their narrative.

GOV. HALEY: Listen, we call them out. We call them out because they think they can go push on people what they want the narrative to be. And they can’t. I’m not going to let them do that. Is America perfect? No. But the principles at the heart of America are perfect. And so, are we going to have instances that are that are bad or we’re going to have racist people out there. Yes. But is the whole country racist? No. I have been around the world and back. And let me tell you what I saw at the United Nations. America is still the standard. When we speak, the world listens. What we do, the world follows. Who we are, the world wants to be.

CLAY: Go ahead.

GOV. HALEY: We, you know, we have to stop this national self-loathing that’s taking over our country and we have to start teaching our children what it means to love America and to fight for her because she’s worth fighting for.

CLAY: You made the decision to run for president after first saying you wouldn’t run if Donald Trump was running. How hard was that decision for you to make? Why did you change your mind?

GOV. HALEY: Well, when I first said it, Biden had just taken office. That was before we had the embarrassing fall in Afghanistan. It was before we saw Biden fall all over himself to get back in the Iran deal, before we saw record inflation. It’s before we saw our education just literally go to pieces and all this woke stuff. But it was before we lost the midterms. And so to me, it’s one of those things that when I look at this, it is time to leave the status quo and the old issues of the past. It’s time to get rid of the chaos and the divisiveness, and it’s time to really focus on what we need to do to fix America.

I mean, you’ve got inflation we haven’t seen in a long time. You’ve got D.C. that’s spending like drunken sailors and we need to put them on a diet. You’ve got the fact that education pre-covid, 70% of our kids that are in eighth grade were not proficient in reading or math. Now, you add covid to it. We’ve got a serious problem on our hands and parents are worried about it. You’ve got the fact that we’ve got crime on our streets. We’ve got open borders like we’ve never seen.

And when Americans woke up to the sky and they see a Chinese spy balloon looking back at them, that is a national embarrassment. And so, for the sake of my kids, one who’s about to get married and I see how hard it is for them to buy a home. A son who’s in college, and I see what the woke education is doing on the wife of a combat veteran. And I know what our military stresses are. I am not going to wait for anyone else. It is time for a new generation. It is time for new leadership. Americans are tired and Americans deserve better. And I’m going to make sure they get it.

CLAY: You were in the U.N. and so you’re uniquely aware of America’s place in the geopolitical universe. When you heard that China was sending a spy balloon over this country and that Joe Biden was not going to shoot it down, what was your reaction? What would you have done if you were in the Oval Office and had been informed as he was about that Chinese spy balloon?

GOV. HALEY: Biden is letting China eat our lunch. But this is the thing. You can’t just blame Biden on this. Republicans and Democrats have thought for too long that if we were nice to China, they would want to be like us. That’s narcissistic. China does not want to be like us. They want to be communist. We have to start changing the way we deal with them. And that starts with the fact we don’t let the Chinese Communist Party buy any land in America, especially when they’re looking at land near military bases near our most sensitive drone technology. We don’t let China go and fund our universities. And if our universities take Chinese money, guess what? They’re not going to get any American money.

We don’t let the Chinese infiltrate our research and development. We start calling them out for stealing intellectual property. And we’re not going to allow any balloons or anything else to fly over. We’re going to put them in their place and tell them exactly what it is we expect of them. We need to start holding them accountable for what they did with covid. And we need to make sure that everybody, when they talk about the drug problem and everything fentanyl is doing — Yes, it’s the Mexican cartels that are moving it. But who’s sending it? It’s China, that’s sending it. And America has got to wake up and be smart to this. And I’m going to make sure that happens.

CLAY: Have you talked to Donald Trump since you officially announced and what kind of relationship do you expect that you will have with him going forward?

GOV. HALEY: I called President Trump before I announced and had a great conversation with him. He is a friend. He’s someone who I was proud to be part of his administration. He was the right president at the right time. But I told him that I thought that we had… I told him all the issues and the reasons that I thought it was important to get in. And I told him that we needed a new generation, that we had to start looking forward and not looking back. And we had a very good conversation. And he will continue to be my friend.

CLAY: Joe Biden’s going to be 82 years old potentially if he runs. You mentioned the idea of cognitive tests. Do you think he has the mental acuity to be president of the United States right now, much less to potentially run and be president until he’s 86?

GOV. HALEY: Well, he’s given a lot of Americans reasons to question it. When you have that kind of fall in Afghanistan, when you sit there and you watch this Chinese spy balloon, and when you hear him say that “The economy’s not that bad,” when we’re all feeling that we can’t afford our groceries and we see how inflation has kicked in, he is telling Americans what he wishes was the case, but he’s not telling Americans the truth. And that calls into question everything. But look, it’s not just about Joe Biden. You can look at everybody in D.C. I’ve never been in D.C., but you look at everybody in D.C. and it is the reason I think we need to have term limits. It’s the reason I think we need to have mental competency tests for over the age of 75. And it’s the reason I think we need to light a fire under every elected official in D.C. and tell them it’s time to stop talking about our issues and it’s time to start getting to work and solving the problems that Americans want them to solve.

CLAY: Many people upon hearing that you were running for president — we’re talking to Nikki Haley — said she’s running to be vice president. How do you respond to that question, that idea?

GOV. HALEY: I don’t play for second. And what I’ll tell you is I am running for president. And when the time is right, I’m happy to let you know who my vice presidential candidate will be.

CLAY: That’s a good answer. When you saw Don Lemon, I want to circle back to that for a moment. Do you think he should be fired for comments like that? What should happen to him? He wasn’t on the show today. His boss has said if he keeps making stupid comments like that, there will be consequences. I’m paraphrasing that, by the way. What should happen to Don Lemon for somebody like him making those kinds of comments in your mind?

GOV. HALEY: I don’t care what happens to Don Lemon. What I care about is the hypocrisy of all of this. You know, here Don Lemon didn’t say that about Hillary Clinton. He didn’t say that about Kamala Harris. He didn’t say it about Elizabeth Warren. And, you know, the idea that they’ll say it about a conservative minority female. That’s more of the issue and it’s more about than just Don Lemon. It’s Whoopi Goldberg and the women on The View. It’s what we see constantly across the media all the time.

It’s the hypocrisy of everything we’re watching. It’s the double standard of all of it. So, you know, you keep or you fire Don Lemon, that’s not going to make a difference. What we need to do is make sure that we continue to call them out every time we see it. And guess what? All they do is make me stronger and more determined to make sure and prove to them that they know what I know, which is they’re sexist. They have more racist tendencies than we do, and that we’re not going to buy it. We’re not going to do it. And the American people don’t deserve what they’re dishing out.

CLAY: Nikki Haley, if people like what they’ve heard here, how can they find out more about your campaign and what should they do to indicate their support?

GOV. HALEY: Look, we’ve lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. We need to start this movement for a new generation, for a new effort of going forward, not looking back. Join our movement. Go to NikkiHaley.com. Join us today. Go tell ten people. And if you’re in Manchester, go out to Manchester tonight. Go and see us at Saint A’s College at 6:00. We had standing room only last night in Exeter. We’re going to have a great time in Manchester. Join our movement and let’s make America right for our kids. They deserve it. You deserve it. And we’re going to make it happen.

Former UN Ambassador @NikkiHaley has announced her first (official) #FITN appearances in New Hampshire:

Exeter Town Hall
Thursday, February 16th
6:00 PM

New Hampshire Institute of Politics
Saint Anselm College
Friday, February 17th
6:00 PM pic.twitter.com/0HsPWOPvpJ

— NH Journal (@NewHampJournal) February 8, 2023

CLAY: Nikki, appreciate you taking the time. Good luck going forward. I’m sure we’ll talk to you again on the show.

GOV. HALEY: Sounds great. Thanks so much.

CLAY: That’s Nikki Haley. She’s running for president.