Nikki Haley Confirms She Targeted Donald Trump in SOTU Response

Haley said Wednesday that tone and language matters in the election, especially with Trump, whom she called a friend.

“Over the years she’s asked me for a hell of a lot of money in campaign contributions”, Trump said.

“I think a lot of what we’re trying to do is say those angriest voices are not helpful”, she said, echoing her response from the previous night.

“You know, I’ve got a daughter that’s a senior in high school, I’ve got a son in middle school, so I’m busy with basketball games and running the State”.

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices…”

On Wednesday morning, she appeared on the Today and confirmed that Donald Trump’s is among those voices.

Haley also said that she was ‘thankful Speaker Ryan and Senator McConnell let me give the speech I wanted to give, ‘ confirming her speech was approved by GOP leaders, she said she it was.

JEB BUSH: She did an extraordinary job, and I think she talked about a more broader, hopeful, optimistic Republican message, a conservative message that draws people, the great diversity of our country, towards our cause. “When you’ve got immigrants that are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion”. And they feel like I do, believe me. She said that while it was aimed at him, it was also aimed ‘at a lot of people’.

“He was one of them, yes”, she said.

Nikki Haley speaks at the National Press Club in Washington on September 2, 2015.

And Haley’s speech Tuesday night was pretty much a direct Trump rebuke – even though she didn’t mention the billionaire by name. On the broad issues of the state of America’s public discourse and the nation’s increasingly diverse identity, “they could have finished each other’s sentences”, according to Ms. Feldmann.

Most State of the Union responses take direct aim at the sitting President, criticizing him for his leadership and agenda. I think we’re seeing it across he country. “Trump should deport Nikki Haley” tweeted conservative commentator Ann Coulter, responding to Gov. Haley’s comments about protecting legal immigration.

Haley’s selection also was an effort to distance the party from some of Trump’s positions, including his call for a halt on Muslim immigration to the U.S. Haley, 43, an Indian-American, spoke out against Trump’s stance toward Muslim immigration and leads an early-voting state considered important to the nominating process. Cheering Trump on have been such GOP nativists as ex-presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafley and Coulter.