\n
![](\"https:\/\/c.ndtvimg.com\/2023-01\/koicbnsg_nikki-haley_625x300_20_January_23.jpg\")
<\/p>\n [ad_1]
\n<\/p>\n
Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced Tuesday she is running for president in 2024, challenging fellow Republican candidate Donald Trump by proposing a “new generation” of leadership in Washington.<\/p>\n
“I’m Nikki Haley and I’m running for president,” the 51-year-old former governor of South Carolina and the child of Indian immigrants said in a video statement.<\/p>\n
“It’s time for a new generation of leadership — to rediscover fiscal responsibility, secure our border, and strengthen our country, our pride and our purpose,” she said in the video shot in Bamberg, the South Carolina town of her birth.<\/p>\n
Casting herself as a younger, fresher alternative to the 76-year-old former president Trump, Haley had been hinting at a possible run for weeks and teasing a “big announcement” on February 15.<\/p>\n
In the end, she made her presidential aims official a day early, on Valentine’s Day.<\/p>\n
Haley is positioning herself as a changemaker who can reinvigorate a party and country she says have lost their way in recent years, and she played up her personal background in her video as a way to unite a nation strained by racial tensions.<\/p>\n
“I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not black, not white. I was different,” she said in the clip.<\/p>\n
“But my mom would always say, ‘Your job is not to focus on the differences, but the similarities.'”<\/p>\n
“Some look at our past as evidence that America’s founding principles are bad,” she went on.<\/p>\n
“They say the promise of freedom is just made up. Some think our ideas are not just wrong, but racist, and evil. Nothing could be further from the truth.”<\/p>\n
Haley is unlikely to be the last Republican to throw their hat in the ring.<\/p>\n
Some Washington watchers speculated that her announcement might prompt a stampede from rivals such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Trump’s vice president Mike Pence.<\/p>\n
Haley also took a mild swipe at the current president — who has not formally announced his re-election campaign but is expected to run again — saying “Joe Biden’s record is abysmal.”<\/p>\n
“But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Washington establishment has failed us over and over and over again.”<\/p>\n
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n