Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.
Trump: They’re poisoning the blood of country.. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world not just in South America… but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia pic.twitter.com/fv38EABo1a
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 16, 2023
It's not just Trump. Even as the GOP has recruited more minority prospects for public office — this year's initial field for the presidential race was historically diverse — more Republicans are latching onto Trump's racially divisive rhetoric.
More recently, some far-righters, conservative groups and others have begun calling former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — whose parents were Indian immigrants — "Nimarata," her first name, rather than Nikki, the middle name she has gone by for most of her life.
- Vivek Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, has won fans among white nationalists for promoting the "Great Replacement Theory," a racist conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being allowed into the U.S. and other Western countries to replace white voters.
- Ramaswamy, who among the GOP candidates has been particularly reluctant to criticize Trump, also has campaigned with former Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has said that U.S. culture can't be restored "with somebody else's babies" and called for an America "so homogeneous that we look a lot the same."
- Last summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' team fired a speechwriter who created campaign material with neo-Nazi imagery, then shared it on a pro-DeSantis Twitter account.
- The emphasis on Haley's Indian heritage has escalated as she has risen in GOP polls and cast herself as a less chaotic, more sensitive conservative than Trump.
- Ramaswamy has called Haley "lying Nimarata Randhawa," referencing her family name before marriage.
- The Florida Standard — a now-defunct pro-DeSantis blog — has done so as well, as did a recent straw poll at a convention of the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA.
