A calmer tone on an angry night
On a night filled with angry screeds against dangers of socialism and angry mobs, Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, stood out as the most effective speaker in terms of making the political case for the president’s reelection. That wasn’t a surprise. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, has political experience that many of the evening’s speaker’s lacked.
Most notably, Haley, a child of Indian immigrants, attempted to draw a contrast with what she called Democratic support of “riot and rage.”
“I was a brown girl in a black and white world,” Haley said. “We faced discrimination and hardship. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate.”
Haley talked about her own work in the wake of the shootings at a Charleston, SC church in 2015, when she helped lead an effort to take down the Confederate flag at the state house.
With Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for vice president, Haley’s speech was a glimpse of what might have been if Trump had replaced Mike Pence with her, as rumors sometimes speculated.
(Reporting by James Oliphant in Washington)