Nikki Haley has applied for Secret Service protection after facing increasing threats on the campaign trail, Fox News reported. The Republican presidential candidate is now former president Donald Trump’s main rival for the 2024 GOP nomination.
Haley opened up about the request for protection in a conversation with The Wall Street Journal. “We’ve had multiple issues,” she said after a campaign event in Aiken, South Carolina. “It’s not going to stop me from doing what I need to do.”
Last week, she was questioned at a new conference why there were increased levels of security at her events.
“When you do something like this, you get threats,” she said. “It’s just the reality.”
Haley stressed that there was a need to “put a few more bodies around us,” adding that it had not really affected her campaigning. “At the end of the day, we’re going to go out there and touch every hand, we’re going to answer every question, we’re going to make sure that we are there and doing everything that we need to,” she said.
A heckler was removed from her campaign event in Hilton Head hours after her conversation with reporters.
Trump moved closer to the Republican presidential nomination after defeating Nikki Haley in New Hampshire’s primary. Haley’s support, at present, is mostly comprised of independents, moderates and anti-Trump Republicans, according to MSNBC. Despite being defeated both in Iowa and in New Hampshire, however, she has refused to quit, insisting that she can still beat Trump, “This race is far from over,” she told a crowd that had gathered in Concord, New Hampshire, for an election watch party. “There are dozens of states left to go and the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina.”
“I’m a fighter, and I’m scrappy, and now we’re the last ones standing next to Donald Trump,” she said.
