On January 8, former President Donald Trump shared a Gateway Pundit post on X falsely claiming that Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is constitutionally disqualified from a “presidential or vice presidential candidacy.”

The false argument, which made its way to Trump through a far-right blog and a notoriously Islamophobic conspiracy theorist, follows a separate, simmering conservative media trend of calling Haley by her first name, Nimarata, rather than the middle name she goes by. Taken together, the two lines of commentary expose the racism behind some of pro-Trump media’s Haley coverage. This attack comes as Haley's polling numbers approach Trump's in New Hampshire.

The Gateway Pundit article the post is based on builds on a post from another pro-Trump blog, American Greatness, which itself pressed the same points as a blog from Rumble host and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer: Since Haley’s parents weren’t U.S. citizens at the time of her birth, these conservative outlets argue, she is merely a birthright citizen, and not a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires for presidents and vice presidents.

This is simply not true: Haley is constitutionally eligible for either office, with her South Carolina birth qualifying her as a “natural born citizen.” The immigration status of her parents is legally irrelevant, despite right-wing media’s long-standing hatred for birthright citizenship and repeated attempts to use these arguments against enemy politicians.

On X (formerly Twitter), the author of the American Greatness piece credited Loomer’s “great investigative work” for having “uncovered” the fact of Haley’s parents’ citizenship -- a secret which Haley wrote about in her 2012 autobiography, and shared with a newspaper in 2015. Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone also promoted Loomer’s so-called investigative work before it ultimately reached the former president.

The racist claim notably echoes some falsehoods levied against former President Barack Obama who, among the many conspiracy theories about his birth, also faced incorrect allegations that he was ineligible for office because of his Kenyan father. (Right-wing influencers also made similar claims about Vice President Kamala Harris.)

But this is not the only commonality between right-wing media coverage of Obama, Harris, and Haley. During the Obama years, conservative media frequently referred to him by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, in a racist attempt to otherize him for what he called his “funny-sounding name.” Again, similar things happened with Harris. And now, some pro-Trump voices are beginning to deploy a similar playbook against Haley and her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa.

Perhaps the most frequent example is Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, who seems to find a certain thrill in using Haley’s first name. “Yeah, that’s right. Her real name is Nimarata,” he once quipped. (Nikki, her middle name, is also her real name.)

Kirk does not exclusively or even mostly use her first name. But for months he has peppered in references to Haley as “Nimarata” while attacking her campaign, warning against her for vice president, or once as an aside while pushing restrictive immigration policy. During an interview with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, he even corrected himself after calling her “Nikki” instead.

American Greatness also had a hand in this trend, with a November debate recap mentioning her squabble with Ramaswamy. The article, which refers to her as Nikki Haley elsewhere, reserves her full name for one brief paragraph that reveals the racist attitudes at the heart of this type of coverage: