BOONE, Iowa – Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley made her first trip to Iowa to support U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who kicked off her re-election campaign on Saturday.
Speaking at Ernst’s 5th annual Roast and Ride at the Central Iowa Expo grounds located near Boone, Haley said she felt sorry for Iowans for the parade of 23 democratic presidential candidates coming to the state.
“It’s a really odd collection of liberals, radicals, and socialists and I know a lot about liberals, radicals, and socialists, in case you forgot I used to work at the United Nations,” Haley joked.
Haley who served as governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by President Donald Trump and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate 96 to 4 and sworn into office on January 25, 2017. She resigned that post at the end of last year after informing the president that she wanted to take a break upon the second anniversary of his administration.
“The U.N. is such an unusual place. Nowhere else in the country can you hear America being denounced in ten different languages at the same time unless, of course, you are on any of our college campuses,” she quipped.
Haley said it was an honor and privilege to work at the U.N., but every day would bring a fight.
“Every day at the U.N. felt like I had to put on body armor. I knew there would be a fight, but I didn’t know which country I was fighting that day,” she said.
Haley said she went to the U.N. to change the culture.
“I wanted every country to know we were taking names,” she stated.
“The U.N. bureaucrats didn’t know what to make of that. We needed to have the backs of our allies and we expected our allies to have our backs,” she remarked.
Haley noted that was not the approach of the Obama administration. She said during the previous administration the United States sided with the nation’s enemies and did not support its allies.
“It got so bad that when communist Cuba put forth a U.N. resolution blaming America for everything that is wrong in their country, the Obama administration abstained,” she reported.
Haley said that Trump was great to work with and she said they “saw eye to eye” on almost everything at the U.N.
She recalled the U.N. vote on Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“The United States puts our embassy in the capital of every country, why wouldn’t we do the same thing in Israel? We recognize the truth that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. As a sovereign country, we have the right to put our embassy anywhere we want. We don’t need U.N. approval. And yet, God bless them, the United Nations decided it needed to vote on whether we could do that,” Haley remarked.
“They were determined to have this vote in order to humiliate America. We warned them that we would be taking names. We ended up getting more votes on our side than any of them thought that we would, but we still lost by a really big margin,” she remembered.
Haley said on that vote they did more than take names, it led to the creation of a strategy book that listed how each country voted with or against the United States. She said they compared that
“It was really stunning. Country after country works against us at the U.N., and then they turn around with their hands out asking for foreign aid,” she said. “Pakistan was a good example. We were giving Pakistan a billion dollars a year for their military. They would vote against at the U.N. constantly, but worse than that, they were harboring terrorists that were trying to kill our soldiers. So we ended that and Pakistan doesn’t get any money anymore.”
She said that Trump was upset after seeing the voting record that Haley and her team at the U.N. kept.
“The administration is now, I’m proud to say, is reviewing every foreign aid program to make sure we are helping our friends and not our enemies,” Haley announced.
Watch her entire speech below:
