Nikki Haley outlines her 2024 campaign strategy to combat national self-loathing while holding Donald Trump accountable for January 6th and criticizing Ron DeSantis's policy shifts. She details saving $3 billion at the UN through term limits and unused fund incentives, arguing that both parties fueled inflation via stimulus. Advocating "peace through strength," she demands stopping aid to hostile nations like China and Pakistan, refusing direct Ukraine cash but supplying weapons to prevent global war. Haley concludes by calling for congressional term limits, state empowerment, and an end to government bailouts to restore truth and accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
I would go into agencies and there would be closets of computers and printers and everything they would do.
And so we start incentivizing agencies to give money back to the taxpayers.
So, you know, when you go in there, what they do is, oh, we need more people for this.
We need more people for that.
You add a new program, that's not adding a person, that's adding 25 more people.
That's the growth of government.
And so at some point you go into every agency, you look at every program and say, what was the intent?
Is it still needed?
I did that in the United Nations.
I went into every single one of the peacekeeping operations we had and I said, what was the original intent?
Are we completing it?
And what's our exit strategy?
Because they had no exit strategies to any of them.
We saved $3 billion the first year.
It's just about putting some good approaches in place that make sure that they're actually meeting the intended goal to start with.
And if there is no goal anymore, you scrap that program.
You scrap the people that go with it, and that's how you clean an agency.
And then you go and you put in something where anybody that's in a role, they can only serve in it four to five years, and then they roll to a different position or another position.
I didn't need to wait to see who else was going to get in.
I didn't need to wait or worry about anything else.
I think if you're going to do this, you have to do it because you know this is what you want and you know this is what you think you can do for the country.
And so we were ready.
And, you know, it's been a month and it's been a whirlwind, but we're working and all is good.
I mean, family is the only reason that you, you know, you've got this, when you, when you know you can fix something.
Like, it just itches at you.
And really, after the midterms, I was like, that's it.
That's it.
You know, I mean, it's how much more do you sit back and watch?
And I've always been a problem solver, and I know what we need to do.
I've been a two-term governor that took double-digit unemployment state and turned it into an economic powerhouse.
I was at the UN.
I didn't deal with one country.
I dealt with 193 and took the kick me sign off of our back.
And I look at where our country is and I see us falling into this socialism and defeatism and, you know, there's not an avenue that we don't have serious issues with.
And I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to do this.
And, you know, it goes back to the fact that I look at my parents.
They came here 50 years ago when America was strong and confident and full of opportunities.
I want to prove to them that they made the right decision.
I'm a military wife, and I've watched my husband and his brothers and sisters go out and fight for our freedoms.
I want them to know their sacrifice mattered, that it means something.
And I look at my kids, and my daughter's getting married, and I see how hard it is for her to buy a home.
And my son is in college, and I see him writing papers he doesn't believe in to get an A.
And none of us should be okay with that.
And recently, 50% of Americans said that they don't think their children will live a better life than them.
I refuse to let that happen to this great country.
I just refuse it.
So I'm going to get in there and do something about it.
And then these last two years, and especially just this last week and a half with all of this banking stuff, it's like everything feels unsettled right now.
Well, when you have a weak president, when you have the most socialist president that we've ever had, that's what's going to happen.
You know, America's not strong on her own.
We have to actually work at it.
And that's the part I hope that Americans take away, is it's going to take every single one of us to fix this.
And in order to do that, you've got to realize a lot of things have gone wrong.
And Dave, it wasn't just the Democrats that did this to us.
There are no saint Republicans right now because you look at Congress and all of this inflation, all the economic issues, that started with Republicans.
That $2.2 trillion stimulus package that was passed, Republicans started it.
Democrats have just run with it after that.
But then what did Republicans do after that?
So first they do this free-for-all.
They expand welfare.
So we now have 90 million people on Medicare, 42 million people on food stamps.
So they expand welfare, and then, oh, it's bad, so what else do Republicans do?
Because when every time, so Republicans usually say we're for small government, we're for low taxes, and every now and again someone does cut taxes.
But when something like the omnibus comes, and they sign on to all of these crazy things, and you know nobody's read the bill, and they know what we're all gonna say about it.
Yet they keep doing it.
Is that to you just like the definition of what the swamp is?
Are you telling me if we increase the deficit and the ceiling, the debt ceiling, every year or two years or whatever, that that might cause a long-term problem?
Do you fear ever that the cultural war has been so lost that even if you have all of the right ideas, right, so we can talk about individual rights and limited government and free speech, all of the right stuff, that the cultural part of this is so messed up and so many people don't understand what the real issues are and kind of just do want the government to do everything that it almost becomes an unwinnable situation for a Republican.
Like if you look at the midterms, it's like the Republicans obviously should have won.
And yet people were basically like, well, the Democrats are running everything.
It's not that good, but I'm not going to vote for Republican.
One of the three things that you just mentioned there, let's talk about the second one for a second, the voting situation, because the Democrats obviously do ballot harvesting, all of this stuff.
You know, Trump is basically running on that they stole the election from him last time.
Are you confident that there would be a situation where states that are still doing this stuff, so let, you know, I know you don't have to worry about, say, a Florida or, you know, another, or Texas.
But how worried are you that California, that Pennsylvania, the states that are doing all of this crazy stuff, no IDs, no signature match, all that, would even allow for an honest and fair election?
And I think the worst part of it's the mail-out balloting.
I mean, that's the part that I think is, that, the harvesting, I think Republicans are too nice.
Republicans have always been too nice.
We need to step up and play the game within the rules, but also call out anything that we see is wrong.
It doesn't mean we say, oh, California's always going to do it.
You call it out no matter what.
We're going to force these states to have to do it right, because if you can get the people to say it, When 73% of Americans say that they think you should have to show your ID in order to vote, that includes Democrats.
We need to start messaging that better and say, don't let them take your rights away.
Don't you want to know that there's integrity to this process?
You know, we made koozies out of it and it said, not in my prime, hold my beer.
We sold $30,000 worth of koozies in 24 hours.
So we literally made lemonade out of lemons.
I mean, look, God bless him.
But I have always made liberals' heads explode.
From the very first time I ran, for the statehouse even.
They can't stand the fact that a minority female would be a conservative.
They can't take it.
And, you know, even when I became governor, there was a senior African-American female Democrat.
And when I became governor and they were celebrating that I was the first female minority governor in history, She went and she said, she's not a minority.
She's just a conservative with a tan.
Like this has always been an issue.
And so for Don Lemon to sit there and do that, you know, Whoopi Goldberg had done it the day before.
What's your policy going to be when it comes to the media?
I mean, obviously you've got Trump loves fighting with the media.
You have DeSantis who's basically saying, I'm going to ignore media that won't treat us fairly.
It seems like you're willing to go in and play with them, but you know you're not going to get a fair shake, you know, if you're on MSNBC or whatever it might be.
So I actually don't want to focus on the former president too much, but one more on that, which is, so if you felt that he was the right guy then, obviously you don't feel that he's the right guy now, which is why you're running.
How much of it, I mean we've talked about the age thing before, but is an actual sort of generational mind shift, meaning that the boomers have been running this forever basically, you and I are Gen Xers, like it's supposed to be someone let's say roughly between 40 and 60.
under, for a couple years, that things were pretty freaking good, and there were peace deals signed, and there weren't all these crazy wars, and all of this stuff.
Your basic policy is peace through strength, right?
I mean, first of all, you look at the fact that everything goes back to Afghanistan.
I mean, it's really, you know, as a military spouse, you know, military families sacrifice a lot.
Michael deployed to Afghanistan.
The idea that we left Bagram Air Force Base in the middle of the night without telling our allies, who stood shoulder to shoulder with us for decades, I mean, is unthinkable.
Because that sent a message to our friends, it sent a bigger message to our enemies.
What did you just say to our military families?
I mean, Michael will tell you, if you wanted to get out of Afghanistan, fine.
But it's not what you do, it's how you did it.
There's a reason that we've got the highest suicide rate now of veterans.
It was the biggest slap in the face, and we lost 13 more soldiers because of it.
How worried are you about the military in general, that there's been such a demoralization, and just that the woke thing has so infected it, and they're talking about gender roles more than they're talking about battle preparedness and all that?
And it didn't go over South Carolina because it loves our beaches.
It went over South Carolina because we're a military state.
They knew exactly what they were doing.
If we did a spy balloon over China, do you think they would have let that happen?
It was a national embarrassment.
And so that, and then all of a sudden Russia goes and has, you know, takes down one of our drones?
It is not what happens to you, it's how you respond to it.
And America has been asleep at the wheel, we've handed China things on a silver platter, we're letting Russia run rogue, and we're not doing enough about it.
Because I don't think you, unless you know exactly where it's going, we should never send money.
We, I don't want to put troops on the ground.
What we do need to do is make sure that we give Ukraine what they need to win.
With the allies.
And this is why it's important.
It's not about Ukraine.
This is about a war on freedom.
And it's one we have to win.
Because if we win this, This sends a message to China, it sends a message to Iran, it sends a message to Russia, it sends a message to North Korea.
If we lose, the lesson is dictators tell you exactly what they're going to do.
Russia has said Poland and the Baltics are next.
We are trying to prevent a world war.
This is in the national security interests of Americans.
So if you go and you have a dictator go and take over a freedom-loving country, if we don't fight for that, Are we that arrogant to think that we're not next or that any of our other allies aren't next?
The problem with people not wanting to spend time on Russia is that's the exact same kind of thinking that got us in the situation that we're in with China right now.
If you don't show strength to them, They will continue to push and push and push.
And I dealt with the Russians and the Chinese.
They think the West are the great sinners.
There is nothing they want more than to take us down.
And you can't give Russia an inch.
Because if you give them an inch, which is exactly what they've seen happen, they're going to go and take down our drones just like they did and violate international law.
I mean, the idea that these men went to the front lines to fight for their freedom, even though they were given five days.
The idea that women said, I'm not going to stand by, and they made Molotov cocktails.
These people have put everything on the line for their freedom and their country.
That used to be us.
We used to fight for our country like that.
Why would we not be there?
I'm the first one to say we should have the backs of our allies and we should hold our enemies to account.
If you want to talk about what we shouldn't be doing.
Last year we gave 46 billion dollars in foreign aid.
Now, when I was at the U.N.
and we moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I was so mad at that vote because we had the right to put our embassy wherever we wanted.
I went to my staff and I said, I want you to do a book.
I said, I want you to list all 193 countries.
I want the second column to be the percentage of times they vote with the U.S.
and against the U.S.
And I want the last column to be how much foreign aid we give them.
I took that book and I gave it to President Trump.
He lost his mind, flipping pages, yelling out letters.
And what I said is, I'm not saying you give foreign aid based on a percentage vote at the UN, but that should be one of the things we do.
Of that $46 billion that Congress approved that was signed last year, We're giving money to Pakistan that was harboring terrorists trying to kill our soldiers, that's now an ally of China.
We're giving money to Iraq that's right there with Iran terrorists that are saying death to America.
We're giving money to Belarus that's holding Russia's hand that's never been friendly to America.
You're giving money to Zimbabwe, the most anti-American African country out there.
You're giving money to Cuba that we labeled as a state sponsor of terrorism.
We're giving money to China Stop giving money to countries that hate America.
That's not what you do.
We believe in freedom.
You can't buy off enemies.
You can't buy off friends.
The best way to show strength is to quit all the nonsense.
The accountant in me always goes back and says, how did we get to this point?
You know, you first have to ask yourself that.
And then you say, OK, where do we go?
How we got to this point, if you flush that much money into the economy, inflation is going to happen.
There was free money.
This was a bubble waiting to happen.
Talk to any of the Wall Street elite.
They will tell you this was the easiest money they ever made.
So then you go and you have all these people with free money doing all of these loans that they did, and then all of a sudden what happens?
The inflation goes up so high because Congress spent all of this money.
And then now you've got SVB where they bought short and they invested long, and in these bonds the interest rate's going up, and then now all of a sudden there's a loss.
But the question in all of that, so first of all you have to blame, you know, Republicans that started it, you've got to blame Biden for continuing it and Congress to continue that.
Then you look at the ball that started rolling.
But look at where the rub is.
SVB isn't like your typical bank.
94% of the money that was in that bank was not insured.
Where was the San Francisco Fed?
All of this was transparent.
They could see it.
So when you see a bank is starting to buy short, but invest long, and interest rates are going up, where were they?
Where were the regulators?
So now you're going to see members of Congress come and say, oh, we have to put regulations on, or we have to do this.
Or that Gavin Newsom, it's now coming out that his wineries, and it sounds like his personal accounts, too, were there, and he was lobbying Joe Biden for the bailout.
I mean, well, nothing with Cali surprises me, I suppose.
So if you want to talk about blame, I would say go there.
So now where do we go from here?
This is the socialism creep that I'm saying is happening in our country.
The idea you're going to take from this group of people to pay off this group of people is wrong.
And I know that they're saying, oh, but we fired management, and the bondholders lost everything, and these are the depositors.
You know what?
We don't reward bad management.
We don't reward when things go wrong.
If a small business went out, who's going to save them?
Who's going to bail them out?
I was opposed to the bank bailouts in 2008.
I was, I have always been opposed to bailouts.
It is a socialist creep that's dangerous.
And all of these Wall Street elites that say, oh, but you know, all the other banks are going to fall.
They've always said the sky's going to fall.
No, it's not.
You know what?
All the other banks will take notice.
And realize what you can't do.
And instead, no one's talking about the Chinese money that was in that bank.
Do you mean to tell me that our consumers, who are now having to pay higher bank fees and get less services because of it, are going to bail out the Chinese companies?
In a way, is that like the biggest reason to drain the swamp?
That people think, oh we can just put enough regulators in these things and then everyone will behave properly and blah blah blah.
But it's like no one's arguing we don't, well I guess somebody is, but like no one I think sort of roughly centrist would say there aren't enough regulators and that's what caused the problem.
So I happen to be more on this side of the argument, too, because otherwise I just see this as endless creep.
We'll just bail out everybody.
No one will ever be responsible.
And then we'll end up with one bank, which will be the United States, that will insure everybody endlessly.
But if you were president right now and that bank failed and you found out that I don't know how many companies, but let's say a hundred companies that were doing their banking there.
Now you have all of these people who were just employees at the companies who are now all out of work because their checks are going to bounce.
Does the government have any responsibility to those people anywhere?
This is where it always pushes, that's that push and pull of small government.
No, I think it's, I think most recently the funny thing is that, um, that CNN did this article and said, Oh, she wants to cut off, you know, social security and Medicare.
And the truth is, yes, we do have to do, and that's what I said.
I said, if you're going to be honest, You know, yes, we claw back the 500.
Yes, we go after the 100 fraud.
Yes, we stop borrowing.
Yes, we cut the spending.
Yes, we cut the earmarks.
But you have to talk about entitlement reform.
And the way you talk about it is, we don't take from anybody that was promised.
Don't touch seniors.
Don't touch anyone that has put money in that has been promised.
My parents are in their 80s.
I don't want anybody taking from them.
But my kids are in their 20s and you go to them and you say the game has changed for you because they know they're not going to get it anyway.
Let's start there.
Start with everyone in their 20s coming into the system and let's do a few things.
One, let's raise their retirement age so that we actually are looking more at life expectancy.
Let's go and change cost of living.
To relate more to inflation instead of just a cost of living.
Let's go and let's make sure we expand Medicare Advantage plans so you have more competition and you run down costs.
Those are the things that we could do that would really make a difference if we did that.
Let's go and limit the benefits that go to the wealthy because, you know, you can talk to people like Bernie Marcus, they'll tell you, I don't want it.
But let's go ahead and limit that.
So, you know, these are truths that we have to acknowledge.
Don't run from it because of what CNN says.
Just go out there and educate on why you think what you think.
Like the Biden thing, it's like, how do you make sense of what... I mean, that's fun too, because you look at, I mean, when you've got such a low bar, I mean, that's not a bad thing.
So, all right, so let's talk about some of the people that you'll be running against on the Republican side, because everyone I think is trying to jockey for, you know, what separates us all on these things.
So first off, I mean, you could be on a debate stage with your former boss, Do you relish in that?
And I think that, you know, I'm a fan of governors.
I think governors know what it means to run something.
They understand how to deal with a crisis.
They understand how to deal with a budget.
There's a lot to be said about a governor.
You know, the only thing I'll say is that, you know, watching him Like, he did a total 180 and switched on where he was on entitlements and is now where Trump is.
He did a total 180 on where he is with Ukraine and is now where Trump is.
So, it just comes across like a Trump echo.
Well, you know, then there's no difference between the two of them.
So actually, instead of with our remaining time going through the laundry list of people that are running, I think those are the big two.
So your feelings are clear on that.
I would just want to ask you sort of philosophically, I think one of the things that I'm seeing bubble up now constantly is that people feel that the machine itself, that the way the United States was constructed cannot work at a federal level, that the states are so out of whack with each other, and that I fled California that I truly see no hope for.
After the last time I was in San Francisco, I mean, It is.
It barely looks like an American city.
It looks like a third world country, basically.
And then I see how things are flourishing here.
That there really is a feeling amongst a certain set of people on the right, like, actually, the united part of this thing is not going to work anymore.
Well, you know, it's like when I was at the United Nations and I was going, my first speech was actually hitting Russia on what they were doing with Ukraine at the time with the whole Crimea thing.
And so when I went in, you know, I drafted my speech.
I was ready to go.
I sent it to the State Department, you know, just in National Security Council so they could look it over.
They call back all upset, saying, you can't say this.
And I said, well, what part, you know, what part's factually incorrect?
And they said, well, none of it's factually incorrect, but you can't talk like this.
And I said, okay, if you've got an issue or a fact that is wrong, I am the first one to want to fix it.
You can't tell me how to say something.
And I just ignored them and I went forward.
But that's kind of, they want you to do it their way.
They want you to do things.
But, you know, the reason that I was able to do so much in the United Nations was I went in with fresh eyes.
You know, I went in and really wanted to break what needed to be broken and see it through a different lens.
And I've never held office in D.C., but I think that same thing needs to happen.
You've got to go in and not have allegiances to anything.
You've got to build the trust back up.
I mean, Americans don't trust Any agency.
And so the number one goal of a leader is Americans should at least trust what these agencies are telling them.
And if they're so big and so bureaucratic and so powerful, something's wrong with the system.
Would you say that's all a result of just sort of bipartisan bad policy or is that really just this, we did 50 some odd minutes, we haven't said the word woke once, like is it just that wokeness has now infected everything and all of the wrong people are being hired for all of the wrong thing, all of the wrong reasons, and nobody's qualified to do any of this?
So I would go into agencies and there would be closets of computers and printers and everything they would do.
And so we start incentivizing agencies to give money back to the taxpayers.
So, you know, when you go in there, what they do is, oh, we need more people for this, we need more people for that.
You add a new program, that's not adding a person, that's adding 25 more people.
That's the growth of government.
And so at some point, you go into every agency, you look at every program and say, what was the intent?
Is it still needed?
I did that in the United Nations.
I went into every single one of the peacekeeping operations we had, and I said, what was the original intent?
Are we completing it?
And what's our exit strategy?
Because they had no exit strategies to any of them.
We saved $3 billion the first year.
It's just about putting some good approaches in place that make sure that they're actually meeting the intended goal to start with.
And if there is no goal anymore, you scrap that program.
You scrap the people that go with it, and that's how you clean an agency.
And then you go and you put in something where anybody that's in a role, they can only serve in it four to five years, and then they roll to a different position or another position.
Every American has to fight for the survival of our country.
And in order to fight for the survival of anything, you have to love it.
We have to go back to loving America.
We have to go back to love the principles of America.
Capitalism has lifted up more people than any place in the world.
We don't need to go into this socialism.
We need to quit beating down You know, America.
I always tell this story because I think it's fascinating.
When I was on the Simon Boulevard Bridge in South America, you saw thousands of people going from Venezuela to Colombia, holding their kids, walking for hours in the hot sun to get to one meal they might get that day.
They were killing zoo animals for food.
And when we got to the Catholic Church, they all started coming around me.
And at first, I was like, why do they care about who I am?
And then it hit me.
They didn't care who I was.
They cared where I was from.
In me, they saw America.
And in America, they saw hope.
We need to appreciate our blessings.
We need to remember what my parents always told my brothers and my sister and me was, even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America.
Now we have to fight for it.
Everybody wants to talk about this political side.
Don't complain about what happens in a general if you don't play in this primary.
Play in this primary.
See America the way it should be.
Want more for your family, and our kids, and our education, and our military, and our foreign policy.
Well, then I guess I can only end this with one last thing, which is I sense your future will be brighter than Don Lemon's, so it's going to all be okay.