A leading professor of US constitutional law condemned Donald Trump for “playing the race card” by propagating the “totally baseless” claim that Nikki Haley, his surging rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is not qualified because her parents were not US citizens when she was born.
“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, told NBC.
“I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of colour – and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”
The term “birther” was coined to describe racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, the first Black US president, which Trump seized on as he established a presence on the political far right.
In 2016, as he ran for president himself, Trump also attempted to raise doubts about Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who was then his chief rival.
Obama’s father was Kenyan and his mother American. He was born in Hawaii. Cruz’s father was Cuban and his mother American. He was born in Canada and moved to Texas when young.
The 14th amendment to the US constitution – the same text under which Colorado and Maine now seek to remove Trump from the ballot for inciting an insurrection – says “all persons born or naturalised in the United States” are citizens. It was introduced after the civil war, conferring citizenship on people once enslaved. The constitution requires that a presidential candidate must be a resident for 14 years, at least 35 years old, and a “natural-born citizen”.
As described in Haley’s autobiography, her parents “were born in the Punjab region of India”. Haley was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, in 1972, a US citizen at birth. Her father became a US citizen in 1978, her mother in 2003. Haley was governor of her home state from 2011 to 2017, then ambassador to the United Nations when Trump was president.
In the race for the Republican nomination, Haley has surged in polling. She has done particularly well in New Hampshire, cutting Trump’s lead to single digits. Trump still dominates in Iowa, the first state to vote next week.
On Tuesday, Trump re-posted to his Truth Social platform a post from the Gateway Pundit, a far-right site, which cited Paul Ingrassia, a New York Young Republican and “constitutional scholar”, as saying Haley was disqualified.
In his own post, Ingrassia cited “great investigative work by Laura Loomer, who uncovered that neither one of Haley’s parents were US citizens when she was born in 1972”. Loomer, a far-right, Islamophobic, white-supremacist Florida activist who has run unsuccessfully for Congress, is an ardent Trump supporter.
Experts agree Haley is qualified to be president, simply because she was born on US soil. Campaigning on a virulently anti-immigrant platform, Trump has promised to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants.
His post about Haley was condemned across the US media – and the political spectrum.
Charles Gasparino, a Fox Business correspondent, said: “The problem with Donald is that he goes disgustingly low and not just against real enemies.”
John Avlon, a CNN political analyst, said: “Trump’s lies are cut and paste: now he’s going birther on Nikki Haley – after trying the same attack on Obama, Harris and Cruz.”
Kamala Harris, the first woman and woman of colour to be vice-president, was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, to parents from India and Jamaica. Trump sought to cast doubt on her eligibility for office during the 2020 election.
