Nikki Haley announces 2024 presidential bid

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Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley mocked the collection of GOP politicians who are still considering a bid for the presidency but haven't yet announced they're running.

"Don't wait around for the guys who are sitting on the sidelines unable to make up their mind," she said Saturday at an exclusive donor retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, where the Club for Growth, a conservative group, is holding a donor retreat with multiple potential presidential candidates.

"Once I decided I was going to run, I didn't see the point in waiting. When it comes to saving America, being decisive matters," she said at the beginning of her remarks.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke on Thursday at the retreat, while former Vice President Mike Pence addressed the gathering on Friday. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, whom Haley first appointed to the position in 2012, is also speaking on Saturday.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also spoke at the retreat. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin were both invited to the Club for Growth retreat but couldn't attend, according to a source familiar with the planning.

But Haley's focus on Republicans didn't stop at her potential primary opponents. She also took issue with "the last two Republican presidents" who, she noted, both added to the national debt, though she didn't explicitly name former presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush.

"Lots of Republican politicians love spending and wasting taxpayer money almost as much as Democrats. The last two Republican presidents added more than $10 trillion to the national debt. Think about that. A third of our debt happened under just two Republicans," she said.

"If we nominate another big spender in 2024, we're going to lose," she added.

In her remarks, Haley also suggested Club donors look at supporting primary challengers against the 158 House Republicans who voted for the recent omnibus spending bill. She derided them as "squishy Republicans" and criticized them and blamed them for getting "the ball rolling" for "trillion-dollar pandemic blowouts."

"Don't let the media tell you Republicans and Democrats can't work together. They always seem to work just fine when they're spending your money," she said.

Haley also said she's "not afraid" to talk about "saving" Social Security and Medicare. The question of whether the two programs should be reformed has exposed some rifts in the 2024 field, with Haley and Pence arguing changes are needed to keep the programs alive in the long term.

She will surely be denounced as a traitor to Trump. And, she isn't exactly White enough for the Repugs' White Nationalist base.

Black voters remember her standing by the confederate flag. when she was elected and her recent attack on a african american democrat candidate saying he should be deported (consider the irony and audacity for her to say the latter).

And she is not a dude. Plenty of antidotal evidence that there is a gender double standard when it comes to judging candidates. I was listening to podcast where the guest a long time political advisor was Republican candidates. He said she does not believe in anything and has a reputation in the party of being ruthless. Those qualities especially the last one are viewed as positives for male candidates.

The double standard is not a MAGA thing, it is universal. That does not mean a women candidate can not win, they can and do. It means they start out with a disadvantage.

She got the legislature to have the flag taken down after black parishioners were massacred in their church by a terrorist who posted photos of the flag before the attack. She later said the flag represents “service, sacrifice and heritage” to some South Carolinians but the terrorist hijacked it, thus the flag had to come down..

Republican 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley said the United States should change the retirement age for citizens currently in their 20s.

Haley, former United Nations ambassador and former governor of South Carolina, also expressed interest in limiting Social Security and Medicare benefits for wealthier residents of the U.S. in an interview on Thursday. Haley's position on reform follows weeks of President Joe Biden and Democrats attacking Republicans for trying to gut the programs.

“What you would do is, for those in their 20s coming into the system, we would change the retirement age so that it matches life expectancy,” Haley said on Fox News.

Haley did not specify what the new age for the younger U.S. residents would be, only saying it would be "the new ones coming in."

"It’s those in their 20s that are coming in," she said. "You’re coming to them, and you’re saying the game has changed. We’re going to do this completely differently.”

The earliest age a person can retire to start receiving monthly Social Security payments in the U.S. is 62. The amount of these payments will vary depending on when a person decides to retire, with those who choose to retire at a later age receiving higher payments than those who retire earlier, according to the Social Security Administration.

The fundraising numbers Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley's campaign filed for the first three months of 2023 came in lower than the numbers her campaign touted in a press release last week.

Her campaign had claimed she raised $11 million since she announced she was running for president in mid-February — and had made it a central point in slamming her most prominent GOP primary opponent, former President Donald Trump.

But according to financial disclosure forms publicly released on Saturday, Haley's campaign raised $3.3 million in contributions. Another $1.8 million was transferred from her joint fundraising committee, for a total of $5.1 million in receipts.

Haley's joint committee, Team Stand For America, is a combination of three separate entities: her presidential campaign; her leadership PAC Stand for America, and a super PAC that supports her candidacy, SFA Inc.

Stand for America, the leadership PAC, raised about $600,000, and received a transfer from the joint committee of $886,000, for a total of nearly $1.5 million. There are limitations to the way these funds can be used — money raised for Haley's leadership PAC may be spent to help other candidates, but it cannot be spent on her own presidential candidacy.

The joint committee received $4.4 million — but that total included the funds that were transferred — $1.8 million to her campaign, and $886,000 to her leadership PAC.

The FEC filings show Haley received about $8.3 million in contributions across all three affiliated campaign entities, rather than the $11 million in the press release.

Her campaign told CBS News that it stands firm on the dollar figure it originally reported, claiming there are multiple entities allowed to fundraise in a political campaign, and it's standard procedure in other campaigns to consolidate fundraising figures.

But Haley's campaign did not address the $2.7 million it appears to have double-counted in arriving at its $11 million total.

Haley's campaign had used her inflated fundraising to mock Trump, bragging that her $11 million was "more than Donald Trump raised in his first quarter in this race, and more than nearly all the Republican presidential candidates in 2016 raised in their first quarter."

While Haley is one of only a few candidates so far to declare she is running, the race for major donors has already begun — and fundraising numbers are often cited as signs of enthusiasm for a candidate long before any votes are cast. And the more money raised overall, the campaign can use for travel, events and staff hires.

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley took aim at President Joe Biden's age in a bid to undermine his campaign on Wednesday, predicting that he won't live until the end of a second term.

"I think we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden, you really are counting on a President Harris," Haley said in an interview on the Fox News show "America Reports."

"Because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely," she told hosts Sandra Smith and John Roberts.

Haley, 51, previously called for mandatory "mental competency tests" for politicians older than 75, also taking a swipe at former President Donald Trump's age.

Nikki Haley mocked Joe Biden for his age, predicting that he'll die in 5 years and won't live to see the end of a second term

This candidate is ageist as f**k.