US President-elect Donald Trump has shut the door on Nikki Haley declaring that he won’t be inviting her to join his administration, but another Indian American, Vivek Ramaswamy, may get a senior role.
Out of the blue, in his post on Truth Social, Trump also said that Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state and Central Intelligence head, won’t get a job with him either.
“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation”, he said on Truth Social, a social media site for short posts that was started when X (formerly Twitter) banned him.
However, he added, “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country”.
During a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump praised Ramaswamy as “very smart” and said that “he's going to be a part of something that's going to be really big”.
“I don't want to tell him yet exactly (his position). We're gonna pick the right (one)”, he said.
Trump added, “We can put him in charge of one of these big monsters (in government) and he'll do a better job than anybody you can think of.”
Haley became the first Indian-American to hold a cabinet post when Trump appointed her as the Permanent Representative to the United Nations, a high-level position in the US.
She quit the job after only two years and quietly began building her base beyond South Carolina state, where she had been governor.
Haley made an unsuccessful run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination and was the last to drop out of the race and endorse him, angering Trump.
Her appeal was to the moderate Republicans, some of whom defected to Vice President Kamala Harris because of what they saw as character problems of Trump.
Although Haley said that she was on standby to campaign for Trump, she was not invited to speak at his rallies or any event.
After criticising his campaign as "overly masculine", she made a last-minute pitch for Trump in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, but it was laced with criticism of him and not a total acclamation.
“I don't agree with Mr Trump 100 per cent of the time. But I do agree with him most of the time, and I disagree with Ms Harris nearly all the time. That makes this an easy call” to vote for him, she wrote.
However, she added the criticism that while the moderates “like much of what he did as President and agree with most of his policies” they “dislike his tone and can't condone his excesses, such as his conduct on January 6, 2021” when his supporters rioted and invaded the Capitol when Congress was in the process of certifying President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election.
The multi-millionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur Ramaswamy also ran against him but folded his campaign early and became his unquestioning supporter, and at one rally compared Trump to George Washington, the Father of the Nation.
Recalling the fight for the party nomination, Trump said, “I had to compete with this guy, and I thought it was going to be easy, but it wasn't. He was nasty. He was quick. He's smart as hell.”
“He did amazingly well, because he started really as a rookie, right? And he got up and he wiped a lot of very smart politicians off the stage”, Trump said.
During a debate of the candidates for the Republican nomination that Trump boycotted, Ramaswamy made the strongest attacks on Haley over her support for aid to Ukraine.
There is also media speculation that Ramaswamy may not take an administration job and instead seek the governorship of Ohio in the 2026 election.
Pompeo had figured in media speculation for a cabinet position, possibly Defence, in Trump’s administration. But apparently the former Army captain failed the loyalty test, even though he endorsed Trump, because he had criticised him for holding on to classified documents after leaving the White House for which Trump was being prosecuted.
He and Haley are staunch supporters of Ukraine, while Trump has been ambivalent claiming he would end the invasion by Russia.
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