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Donald Trump considering Nikki Haley for the post of Secretary of State

By FnF Desk | PUBLISHED: 18, Nov 2016, 17:53 pm IST | UPDATED: 18, Nov 2016, 17:56 pm IST

Donald Trump considering Nikki Haley for the post of Secretary of State New Delhi: Being npredictable will be among his trademark features as President, Donald Trump promised during his election campaign, and true to his pledge, he has thrown in a wild card as a potential candidate for secretary of state.

The capricious president-elect is tapping South Carolina governor Nikki Haley nee Nimrata Randhawa for the critical post in his administration. If his gambit comes through, she would be the first person of Indian origin to be a cabinet principal. It will continue the more recent tradition of women in that position. Three of the last five people to head the state department were women (Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton).

Nikki Haley, 44, was scheduled to meet the president-elect at Trump Towers late Thursday, his transition team confirmed after reports that she was in the running for the top job at Foggy Bottom. Although Haley is among several people Trump is meeting during the day, the rest of the line-up, foreign policy patriarch Henry Kissinger, retired General Jack Keane, and Admiral Mike Rogers among them, appear more like an advisory council being tapped for ideas. In a side lacking in bench strength, Haley appears to be the interviewee.

While several other more prominent names have been making the rounds for the Secretary of State post - Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton among them - choosing Haley may be the first sign that Trump will not necessarily appease the slavering mobs of white conservative insurgents who fueled his march to the White House. Picking a female of foreign-origin -- although she was born in Bamberg, South Carolina -- for the key post will send a strong and reassuring message to the rest of the world that his administration is not going to be overrun by racists and xenophobes.

For that to happen, Trump will have to navigate a Haley nomination past the white insurrection that made anyone of foreign-origin subject to a suspicious inquisition during the campaign, the treatment of Huma Abedin being an extreme example.

Haley though is in a different league - and from a different political dispensation - having won the governorship of a southern state when she was only 38, and winning a second term four years later. In already breaking barriers, she also became the first female governor of South Carolina, besides being its first non-Caucasian and first Asian-American governor. Haley was briefly in the running to be on Trump's vice-presidential ticket after she disdained him during the primaries where she backed Marco Rubio. After criticizing Trump's stand on several issues, and calling him an ''angry man,'' for his vituperative campaign, she backed him with some reservation once he clinched the nomination.


Republican strategists who favored her on a veep ticket called her an ''optimistic, sunshine consevative in the Reagan tradition,'' who would help counter the impression of the GOP as a party of grouchy, old, white, rich men. A similar argument can be made for her Foggy Bottom nomination, although arch conservatives and white supremacists in the party will cast aspersions on her ethnic and religious origins, something Haley has not cared to hide. Although she identifies herself as a Christian now, she has not disowned the Sikh religion she was born into and attends gurdwara services even now. She and her husband Michael Haley were married in both Sikh and Methodist ceremonies.


Haley visited India as South Carolina governor in November 2014 to promote the state's business interests, and expectedly spend time in her ancestral Punjab, visiting the Golden Temple.
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