Former US President Donald Trump has taken issue with the eligibility of former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley to run for office.
According to The New York Times (NYT) and other sources, former President Trump shared a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, on the 8th (local time) raising questions about Haley’s birth. The original post was written on the far-right website Gateway Pundit. The author claimed that since Haley’s parents were not US citizens at the time of her birth in 1972, she is ineligible to run for president.
In fact, Haley’s parents were not US citizens when she was born. The Gateway Pundit mentioned this fact and, based on some constitutional scholars’ interpretation of the constitution, viewed Haley as ineligible to be president. They demanded Haley to voluntarily resign before being attacked by the Democratic Party.
Three main conditions are required to run for US president: being over 35 years old, being a US citizen from birth, and having lived in the US for more than 14 years. The issue that the Gateway Pundit raised about Haley pertains to the second condition: whether she was a US citizen from birth.
However, in the United States, which adopts jus soli (right of soil), this dispute is meaningless. According to the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, anyone born in the United States is immediately granted US citizenship. While the US Constitution considers that exceptions may occur for naturalized citizens or those who became citizens under its jurisdiction at the time of acquiring citizenship, it does not make exceptions for people like Haley who were born on US soil.
The NYT analyzed, “Former President Trump, who studied this fact enough during the Obama incident, will not create controversy to aim for Haley’s resignation,” and “The purpose of this controversy is to inform that Haley is an immigrant of Indian descent.”
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