World
Haley’s campaign a giant step for GOP women, but bigger still for Trump
With polls showing Nikki Haley trailing Donald Trump by a wide margin heading into this weekend’s South Carolina Republican primary, many political analysts characterise the vote as Haley’s last stand in her quixotic bid to win the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
Regardless of the result, however, scholars have said that Haley’s campaign is a historic one. By outdistancing a field dominated by men to effectively challenge the immensely popular Trump, she has moved women one step closer to political parity in electoral politics.
Polls indicate that Trump is leading Haley by as many as 36 percentage points heading into Saturday’s South Carolina primary, even though Haley is a native and former governor of the Palmetto State. And while winning the South Carolina primary would open the door for Trump to capture the party’s nomination outright when 15 states hold their primaries simultaneously next month, Haley’s campaign has, at least in theory, charted a path to remain in the race until Super Tuesday, which could give the former United Nations ambassador an advantage in the 2028 presidential ballot.
Haley, for her part, has pledged to remain in the race despite the odds. Speaking at her alma mater, Clemson University, on Tuesday, she said, “Some of you — perhaps a few of you in the media — came here today to see if I’m dropping out of the race,” she said. “Well, I’m not. Far from it.”
Haley’s emergence as the last woman standing in what was a crowded race stands in stark contrast to candidates like former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and ex-Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who styled themselves as “anti-Trump” candidates. Conversely, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hewed close to Trump in both style and substance before dropping out in January, after failing to distinguish himself from the frontrunner and presumptive nominee.
Haley, on the other hand, has staked out a middle ground, portraying herself as a would-be “accountant” in the White House, and consequently a calming alternative to Trump’s four years of “chaos”.
Initially circumspect in her criticism, Haley has turned up the heat as the GOP field has narrowed, attacking Trump’s efforts to insert loyalists in the Republican National Convention, highlighting his rising stack of legal troubles, and taking more direct aim at Trump’s “insecurity” and temper tantrums.
Her policy proposals, however, are not substantively different from her former boss, and as recently as this month, Haley told reporters in South Carolina that her campaign is not an “anti-Trump movement”, according to the Washington Post.
Part of Haley’s strategy is to walk a tightrope when it comes to addressing her gender and Indian ancestry in a modern Republican party that is slow to change, Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told Al Jazeera.
For instance, Dittmar said that Haley has, in many ways, leaned into her role as the rare woman in a Republican presidential race, but she has not necessarily portrayed gender as a “point of merit”, underscoring the conservative “idea that somehow hearing about gender and racial identity is anti-meritocratic … and [Republicans] don’t play into identity politics.”
“If you go back to Hillary Clinton in 2016, she used to say, ‘I’m not asking you to vote for me because I’m a woman, I’m asking you to vote for me on the merits. But one of those merits is I’m a woman,’” Dittmar said.
In contrast, Haley has used gendered imagery to boost “masculine credentials” and an image of male toughness that still resonates in the party, repeatedly referring to her high-heeled shoes as “ammunition”. In the advertisement launching her campaign, she proclaimed, “When you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
Moreover, on the issue of race, Haley has tacked to the right, consistent with Trump’s own views, sparking controversy by failing to cite slavery as a reason for the US Civil War. And she has repeated a regular Republican line, most recently in an interview in late January. “I don’t think America’s racist,” she said. “I think we have racism in America.”
A historical benchmark
In turn, Trump’s attacks on Haley suggest that there remains a tolerance – if not appetite – for racism and sexism among his supporters, Dittmar said. In January, Trump referred to Haley as “birdbrained” and “not presidential timber”.
Trump has amplified the conspiracy that Haley, who is of Indian descent, was not born in the US, redolent of a tactic known as “birtherism” which he championed during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, falsely alleging that the nation’s first African American president was born in Kenya, and was therefore ineligible to run for president.
The former president has also referred to Haley as “Nimbra”, an apparent debasement of her first name, Nimarata (Nikki, the name she uses, is her middle name).
Many have said that Trump’s remarks are hardly surprising for a candidate who had previously bragged about sexually assaulting women, derided his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman” who did not look presidential and suggested in 2015 that a female debate moderator had “blood coming out of her whatever”.
While such attacks have come to be seen as part and parcel of a Trump campaign, Dittmar noted that studies have regularly indicated high measures of “hostile sexism” and “racial resentment” among his supporters.
“It is not surprising that Trump would use sexist or racist language or strategies, because that’s actually been beneficial for him to mobilise a lot of these voters,” Dittmar told Al Jazeera. “[Nikki Haley] brings that out, but perhaps to his advantage, at least among his base”.
Haley has fought back, launching the National Women for Nikki Coalition, a 50-state effort that many see as a last-ditch effort to energise the voting bloc.
And while it may ultimately be a matter of too little, too late, Haley’s staying power in the race represents a historical benchmark for a political party that has traditionally been dominated by white men. And both voters, donors and the media appear to hold her in much higher regard than Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and self-proclaimed “hockey mom” who was often ridiculed by stand-up comedians and late-night talk show hosts.
“It is notable to recognise and to give Haley credit for pushing the envelope on the Republican side for at least more seriously taking a woman candidate as a potential nominee,” Dittmar said.
“In the modern context, she will have gotten farther than any other Republican woman, and I do think that that’s something worth pointing out, regardless of what happens.”
Electoral vulnerabilities
While a resounding defeat in South Carolina seems likely, Haley’s race has, if nothing else, taken the temperature of the modern Republican Party and the existential crisis represented by Trump’s enduring hold, according to politics watchers.
Perhaps most illuminating during Haley’s run has been just how difficult it has been for Haley – or any of the now departed Republican candidates – to find any purchase in attacks on Trump, a heterodox politician who has continued to polarise members of the party.
In 2020, a movement against Trump largely coalesced under the “Never Trump” banner. While that effort has been less vocal this election cycle, there is a “minority, but a significant kind of disaffected Republican voter still looking for an alternative to Trump,” according to Aaron Kall, an elections expert at the University of Michigan.
“That shows that if Trump is the nominee, which is still likely, that he does have some general election vulnerabilities,” he said.
He pointed to several prominent donors who have continued to provide the funds Haley needs to stay in the race, many hailing from the more traditional conservative old guard of the Republican Party. Haley’s campaign said she raised $16.5m in January – nearly a third of the $42m in campaign cash raised by Trump last month – which Haley described as her largest monthly haul since entering the race.
Before the South Carolina primary, Haley also attended a Texas fundraiser co-hosted by real estate magnate Harlan Crow and oil tycoon Ray Lee Hunt, among others, according to Fortune magazine.
Enduring hold
Some have viewed Haley’s persistence as an effort to position herself as the natural successor to Trump in the event that he is unable to be the party’s nominee.
Trump is the first candidate in US history to face one criminal indictment – let alone four – during his campaign, creating an unprecedented situation that could potentially find the former president behind bars come November, raising the question of electability.
“We have empirical evidence to show that MAGA [Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement] has been dwindling in size, not growing in influence in the party,” Rina Shah, a political strategist, told Al Jazeera.
She pointed to the 2022 midterm elections in which Trump-endorsed candidates underperformed, resulting in a predicted red wave turning into a ripple.
Shah said she believes Haley’s losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, and recent polls, have not reflected the extent to which Trump has turned off some segments of the Republican Party, particularly suburban women.
“The general election of 2024 is going to be determined by independently minded voters in swing states,” Shah told Al Al Jazeera. “That is who I believe Trump cannot bring in in this election because he lost them in 2020 in a big way.”
Still, the former president has demonstrated an ability to mobilise his enthusiastic base, something that his Democratic opponent, President Joe Biden, has not been able to do so far this election season. The irony, Shah said, is that while Haley’s campaign has raised the bar for women running for high political office, it has paradoxically shown that Trump is a political juggernaut.
Even when Trump is “hardly campaigning, when he’s under all these legal challenges”, Shah pointed out that “his base’s loyalty to him is just so much deeper than we have seen with other candidates”.
In sum, Haley’s run has shown the Republican Party “is still a cult of personality” – for Trump.
Sombr was mid-performance at the Brit Awards when a random man bumrushed the stage and pushed the singer off the platform, leaving him stunned — only it was all planned, says his rep.
The singer-songwriter, who was nominated for international artist and international song, was at the end of his smash single “Undressed” when a man joined him on the podium and shoved him hard. Security guards aggressively removed the man from the stage, and Sombr returned to the microphone to segue into his next song.
Shortly after the performance came to a close, Sombr’s rep confirmed to Variety that the whole thing was part of the act. Fans were already split online over whether the incident was staged or real. Naysayers noticed that the offender was wearing a shirt that read “Sombr is a homewrecker” — a nod to his latest single “Homewrecker,” which some claimed was a dead giveaway. But others weren’t necessarily convinced it was a stunt, considering how hard he was pushed and how additional security guards came to his rescue.
Brits host Jack Whitehall remarked on the incident after Sombr’s performance concluded. “Such a shame we didn’t have the security ready,” he said.
The incident took place just days after Britain’s BAFTA Awards last Sunday, when John Davidson, the Scottish Tourette’s syndrome activist and real-life inspiration for the film “I Swear,” disrupted that ceremony with an outburst of racial slurs that occurred as “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage. “I can’t begin to explain how upset and distraught I have been as the impact from Sunday sinks in,” Davidson told Variety earlier this week.
Whitehall made a joking reference to that incident — which was not bleeped from the initial BAFTA broadcast and was audible to viewers — at the top of the Brits, saying “We’ve got the best in the business on the bleep button.”
Sombr is coming off a red-hot year that saw his various singles “Undressed,” “Back to Friends” and “12 to 12” impact the charts. He recently performed at the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for best new artist alongside Addison Rae, Alex Warren, the Marías, Leon Thomas, Lola Young, Katseye and Olivia Dean, who ended up taking home the award.
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Iran was plunged into an internet blackout Saturday after Israel and the U.S. launched military strikes around the country, according to a global internet monitor.
Within hours of the strikes — which officials said targeted infrastructure and killed dozens of senior regime figures at a compound in Tehran— NetBlocks CEO Alp Toker confirmed connectivity started “flatlining.”
“We’re tracking the ongoing blackout, but our assessment is that this is straight out of Iran’s wartime playbook and consistent both technically and strategically with what we saw during the 2025 Twelve-Day War with Israel,” Toker told Fox News Digital.
“Iran’s internet connectivity is now flatlining around the 1% level, so the original blackout the regime imposed during the morning has been consolidated,” he confirmed.
“The blackout was imposed just after 7:00 UTC, not long after the attack on the Iranian regime compound,” Toker clarified, adding that Iran had been largely offline for approximately 12 hours following the attack.
“At 06:10 UTC, there is the main compound strike; at 07:10 UTC, telecoms disruption starts; at 08:00 UTC, the blackout is largely in effect; and by 08:30 UTC, connectivity flatlines.”
“Wartime national blackouts are exceedingly rare around the world, and it’s something we’ve only really seen at this scale in Iran,” he said.
President Donald Trump monitors U.S. military operations in Iran following an Israeli strike in Tehran on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (@WhiteHouse/X)
In the wake of the attack, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that the “heavy and pinpoint” bombing in Iran “will continue uninterrupted throughout the week or as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
He claimed Iranian security forces and members of the regime’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were already seeking immunity. He urged them to “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots.”
“We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces no longer want to fight and are looking for Immunity from us,” Trump said in the post. “As I said last night, ‘Now they can have Immunity; later they only get Death!’”
Toker argued the timing of the blackout suggested it was imposed deliberately as the regime sought to secure communications amid fears of further targeting.
TRUMP TELLS IRANIANS THE ‘HOUR OF YOUR FREEDOM IS AT HAND’ AS US-ISRAEL LAUNCH STRIKES AGAINST IRAN
TEHRAN, IRAN – FEBRUARY 28: Smoke rises over the city center after an Israeli army launches 2nd wave of airstrikes on Iran on February 28, 2026. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images) (Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The Iranian regime will have deployed this new blackout to counter potential cyberattacks during their own military operation, but also to avoid leaking the locations of senior regime figures through metadata and user-generated content,” he said.
“Communications would have been limited, and Iran’s leadership would have proceeded with the assumption that all communications, including satellite or whitelisted networks, carry risks,” he said before claiming that “paranoia would be well grounded at this point, with the blackout a belated but direct response to that.”
“Those participating directly would already know to avoid technology that could betray their whereabouts,” Toker said.
“However, the metadata may well have played a part in determining that the meeting of regime leaders was being held at the Tehran compound, who was in attendance, and at what time.”
DID THEY GET HIM? KHAMENEI’S FATE REMAINS UNKNOWN AFTER ISRAEL-US STRIKE LEVELS HIS COMPOUND
In this handout image provided by the Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addresses the nation in a state television broadcast on June 18, 2025 in Tehran, Iran. (Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran via Getty Images)
Toker revealed that the broader network around the regime leaders and around the compound wouldn’t have had the same strict restrictions.
“This kind of adjacent ‘background noise’ can be correlated against other intelligence sources to build an understanding of activity on the ground,” he added.
“Smartphones are a readily available, almost ‘free’ source of intelligence, and even when locked down, they eventually connect to international online services and generate insights that can be used to pinpoint regime figures,” Toker said.
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“In the aftermath of Saturday’s strike, this concern will have been high on the remaining Iranian leadership’s minds, especially if they didn’t have a clear and specific understanding of how the meeting was compromised.”
Iran has previously imposed sweeping internet shutdowns during periods of domestic unrest, including nationwide protests in January, which saw thousands killed, often seeking to curb the spread of information and restrict coordination.
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Women’s rights groups and activists hailed the European Commission’s decision on accessible abortion across Europe, calling it a “historic” move for women’s rights and European democracy.
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The move marks an unusual step taken by the European Union, as healthcare policy is typically determined at a national level.
On Thursday, the European Commission confirmed member states can use an EU social fund to provide access to safe and legal abortion for women who are barred from doing so in their home country.
Member states can make use of the bloc’s existing European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), which contributes to social, education, employment and healthcare policies, voluntarily and in accordance with their domestic laws to provide such support.
“We were very aware of the competence that the European Union has in this area, which is restricted,” Europe’s Associate Director for the Center for Reproductive Rights Katrine Thomasen told Euronews, pointing to the fact that the bloc can support, coordinate or supplement the actions of members states, but cannot impede on national laws, such as healthcare policies.
The Commission stopped short of creating a new funding mechanism, which was requested by the European Parliament in a non-binding resolution adopted in December.
Critics argued that by declining to establish a dedicated fund and instead referring to an existing one, the EU was effectively failing to act and rejecting the proposal.
However, women’s rights organisations say the decision affirms that the EU has the competence to act on sexual and reproductive heath and creates a pathway towards accessible abortion.
“It was previously not clear that member states could use EU funding to provide abortion care to women facing barriers,” Thomasen said, “the Commission’s decision is really the first time that it is affirming and deciding that EU funds can be used in this way”.
Member states that wish to benefit from the ESF+ to offer accessible abortion services will now need to establish programmes and define how patients can benefit from it.
‘My Voice, My Choice’
The Commission’s decision came in response to a call made by the citizens’ initiative “My Voice, My Choice” for the creation of an EU solidarity mechanism to guarantee safe and affordable access to abortion for all women.
“My Voice, My Choice” is a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), a mechanism that allows citizens to call on the European Commission to propose new legislation.
If an initiative gets the support of at least one million people across at least seven EU countries, it must be discussed by the European Parliament, while the European Commission has a timeframe to either set out legislative measures or provide justification for not doing so.
“My Voice, My Choice” collected 1,124,513 signatures across all 27 countries.
“My Voice, My Choice started on the streets, it started with a group of women who had had enough that women are secondary citizens,” the initiative’s coordinator Nika Kovač told Euronews.
“We decided to take action and we brought something to the table. We brought our own chair to the places where we usually don’t have the chairs,” Kovač added.
The movement gained cross-border momentum, with women’s rights activists mobilising across Europe. With over one million followers on Instagram, “My Voice, My Choice” also built a strong online presence.
Dutch journalist Belle de Jong campaigned for the initiative in Malta, where abortion remains criminalised and heavily restricted. She described the challenges of organising on the ground, noting that many women were reluctant to take to the streets because of stigma and fear of legal consequences.
De Jong told Euronews that the campaign’s success in Malta was largely because it was online, “so people didn’t have to go out into the streets or show their face,” she said, adding that she collected more than 4,000 signatures for Malta, more than double she expected.
“Thanks to My Voice, My Choice, we no longer have an excuse to prosecute women for accessing healthcare, because we’re paying for them to go abroad with this EU mechanism. So it really begs the question: when are we going to decriminalise it? That will be our next fight in Malta,” she added.
The decision sparked a range of reactions from politicians
Several members of the European Parliament have expressed satisfaction after the Commission’s statements.
“For the first time the Commission has confirmed that countries can use EU funds to support access to abortion care. This is a victory for European women”, said Slovenian Socialist MEP Matjaž Nemec, who penned a letter to the Commission ahead of the decision.
Valérie Hayer, President of Renew Europe, said the decision “marked real progress for women’s rights,” underlining that the Commission had never before stated so clearly that EU funding can support access to safe abortion.
Other MEP’s, including Emma Fourreau from the Left group and French MEP Mélissa Camara from the Greens/EFA group considered the move a step forward, but would have liked to see a dedicated budget.
On the other side, far-right Spanish party Vox claimed that the Commission has rejected the “My Voice, My Choice” initiative, as there will be no specific fund to finance abortions abroad. “The Commission is just trying to politically save the initiative by pointing out existing instruments,” a press release from the party states.
The Italian anti-abortion association “Pro Vita & Famiglia” (Pro Life and Family) also considered that the initiative was rejected, while criticising its opening up to the use of ESF+ money to finance reproductive healthcare. “We ask the Italian government not to use this money to promote abortions”, said spokesperson Maria Rachele Ruiu.
Abortion policies across the European Union
Some EU countries have highly restrictive laws on abortion rights. A total ban is in force in Malta, where abortion is not allowed under any circumstances, while in Poland it is permitted only when conception follows sexual violence or when there is a risk to the woman’s health.
In January 2021, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal banned abortions in cases of fetal malformation, which until then had been the most frequent reason for terminating pregnancies in the country.
Several EU countries have taken steps to guarantee the right to safe abortions. France, for instance, made it a constitutional right, while Luxembourg and the Netherlands have removed mandatory waiting periods.
Sweden, France, and the Netherlands rank best in the European Union for abortion rights, according to the European Abortion Policies Atlas 2025. Malta and Poland remain at the bottom of the ranking, along with Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco.
Some countries have more relaxed laws, but they lack legal protections that fully decriminalise abortion, wide service availability, national health coverage, or government-led information on the matter.
Other member states have recorded new restrictions, increased harassment of abortion providers, and the spread of disinformation on the topic.
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