Former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley called out Democrats for lacking confidence in America during a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Tuesday night.
“As my great predecessor, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick famously said, in Reagan’s time the left was happy to ‘blame America first,’” Haley said. “Today’s Democrats don’t even believe in America.”
“Anger toward America is now the bedrock belief of the American left,” she added. “We’ve reached a place where the President and Vice President of the United States routinely accuse America of ‘systemic racism.’”
Haley echoed her own belief that the U.S. is not a racist country and reflected her own experience as “a brown girl in a black-and-white world.” She admitted America had its flaws, however she said Democrats were remiss in thinking those faults were “more profound than its strengths.”
“They deny the massive progress we’ve made, and they punish anyone who disagrees,” she said, stating that Democrats had discarded the “unifying” message of former president Barack Obama and had “given up on America as a colorblind society.”
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Nikki Haley, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Oval office of the White House on October 9, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Haley quoted then-Senator Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he declared “there is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America and an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”
“Can you imagine any prominent Democrat making that statement today?” she asked. “I can’t.”
The way is clear for Republicans to make the most of that unifying message, because “that message was our message first,” she said.
Haley also condemned Biden’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, saying that it has made America vunerable and that it “didn’t have to be this way.”
“Joe Biden pulled everything out with no conditions,” she said. “Our worst fears were realized within days. Everyone saw it coming, except the president, who promised it would never happen. Where I come from, that’s a fireable offense.”
The agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan was worked out by the Trump administration, and had an original deadline to leave on May 1, 2021, before the Biden administration pushed it to Sept. 11.
Even though the Taliban broke conditions of the agreement, the Biden administration continued to go forward with the withdrawal.
“America is in greater danger today than we were just three months ago,” Haley said. “Joe Biden thinks retreat is a sign of strength. He doesn’t even realize that his actions have told the world that America is too weak to stand up for itself.”
