Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy took Nikki Haley to task during the fourth Republican presidential debate on Wednesday evening over her cozy relationship with big corporations and wealthy donors.
Debate moderator Megyn Kelly noted Haley left government service in 2018 with just $100,000 in the bank, but she has amassed an estimated $8 million in the years that followed thanks to lucrative corporate speeches and board memberships. Kelly asked Haley if she is in too tight with the corporations and billionaires to court average Republican voters.
Haley argued she’s been a “conservative fighter all my life” and said she will “take support from anybody we can take support from.”
“When it comes to these corporate people who suddenly want to support us, we’ll take it,” she said. “I don’t ask them what their policies are, they ask me what my policies are.”
She suggested some of them don’t condone her toughness on China, her opposition to corporate bailouts or her support of the pro-life cause, but that the donors and corporations don’t sway her policy views.
But Ramaswamy pushed back against her claims that she is not responsive to the will of her donors.
“You were bankrupt when you left the U.N.,” he said. “After you left the U.N. you became a military contractor, you actually started … serving on the board of Boeing whose back you scratched for a very long time, and then gave foreign multinational speeches like Hillary Clinton did and now you’re a millionaire. That math does not add up. It adds up to the fact that you are corrupt.”
Ramaswamy called out a $250,000 donation made by major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman to a super PAC supporting Haley.
Hoffman, the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn and a Biden supporter, explained in a LinkedIn post that he donated to Haley because “my first priority is to defeat Trump, and the primary is the first of two chances to do so.”
“Larry Fink, the king of the woke industrial complex, the ESG movement, the CEO of BlackRock, the most powerful company in the world, now supporting Nikki Haley,” Ramaswamy added.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase who has described himself as “barely a Democrat,” recently implored business leaders at the New York Times DealBook event, “Even if you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you, help Nikki Haley, too.”
Ramaswamy suggested Haley’s comments about the need to have social-media users verify their identities, which came the same day Haley reportedly met with Fink, is evidence she is swayed by her donors.
“This is far more corrupt that I even imagined when I entered politics,” he said, arguing the country needs a leader from the outside, not politicians who are “puppets for the puppetmasters.”
Haley defended her service on the board of Boeing, saying she stepped down from the board after ten months when the company decided to pursue a corporate bailout, something she did not agree with.
“There’s nothing to what he’s saying in terms of these donors who are supporting me,” she said. “They’re just jealous. They wish they were supporting them.”
Haley’s said in a press release that she has over 150,000 donors and the campaign’s average donation is under $100.
“Yes, a few dozen donors are from Wall Street—just like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. The vast majority of her supporters are hardworking Americans from all 50 states,” the campaign said.
DeSantis, for his part, touted his own record of taking on ESG in the state of Florida and accused Haley of meeting with the same people who are pushing ESG and wanting to change the country without going through the constitutional process.
“We know from her history Nikki will cave to those big donors when it counts and that is not acceptable,” DeSantis said.
Ramaswamy went on to suggest Haley read his book that was meant to be a warning about the woke industrial complex as a manual, “just like she read George Orwell’s books.”
“The only person more fascist than the Biden regime now is Nikki Haley, who thinks the government should identify everyone of those individuals with an ID. That isn’t freedom, that is fascism and she should come nowhere near the levels of powers, forget about the White House,” he said.
Haley claimed she never suggested internet users should supply their ID, arguing that she instead advocated for social-media companies to be transparent about their algorithms. She said while she will fight to protect freedom of speech for Americans, foreign bots don’t need free speech protections.
Though she again suggested the internet would be more civil if people had their names attached to their posts, she claimed she never said the government should require anyone’s names.
DeSantis replied, “It was a bad idea and she should own up to it.”
Haley said last month that “every person on social media should be verified, by their name.”
“That’s, first of all, it’s a national-security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden, people have to stand by what they say,” she said. “And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots and the Chinese bots. And then you’re gonna get some civility, when people know their name is next to what they say.”
After Haley received widespread criticism over her remarks, her campaign appeared to walk them back.
“Russia, China, and Iran are engaging in wide-scale information warfare. Ignoring this national security threat is dangerous and naive,” the campaign told National Review last month. “Social media companies need to do a better job of verifying users as human in order to crack down on anonymous foreign bots. We can do this while protecting America’s right to free speech and Americans who post anonymously.”
The campaign added that Haley’s main concern is “cracking down on Chinese, Russian, Iranian, etc. bots that engage in massive online information warfare,” leaving out any mention of her vow to combat online incivility by forcing social-media companies to eliminate anonymity.