US President-elect Donald Trump closed the door on Nikki Haley, declaring that he wouldn't be inviting her to join his administration, but another Indian American, Vivek Ramaswamy, may get a senior role.
Out of the blue, in his post on Truth Social, Trump also said that Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state and Central Intelligence head, won't get a job with him either.
"I won't be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to join the Trump Administration currently in formation," he said on Truth Social, a social-media site for short posts which he founded when X (previously Twitter) banned him.
He qualified the remark, however, with the comment: "I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country."
Speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on April 29, Trump commented about Ramaswamy that he was "very smart," and "he's going to be a part of something that's going to be really big.".
"I don't want to tell him yet exactly (his position). We're gonna pick the right (one)," he said.
Trump added, "We can put him in charge of one of these big monsters (in government) and he'll do a better job than anybody you can think of."
Haley was the first Indian-American to hold a cabinet post when Trump appointed her as the Permanent Representative to the United Nations, a high-level position in the US.
She quit the job after two years and quietly began building her base beyond South Carolina state, where she had been governor.
Haley failed in her quest to become the presidential nominee of the Republican party and was the last one of those contenders to withdraw from the race and to endorse him, something that angered Trump.
Her appeal was to the moderate Republicans, some of whom defected to Vice President Kamala Harris because of what they saw as character problems of Trump.
Although Haley declared she was on standby to campaign for Trump, she was not invited to speak at his rallies or any event.
Later, criticizing his campaign as "overly masculine," she took a last-minute pitch for Trump in an op-ed article in *The Wall Street Journal*, but it was laced with criticism of him and not a total acclamation.
"I don't agree with Mr Trump 100 percent of the time. But I do agree with him most of the time, and I disagree with Ms Harris nearly all the time. That makes this an easy call" to vote for him, she wrote.
But in her criticism, she claimed that the moderates "like much of what he did as President and agree with most of his policies" but "dislike his tone and can't condone his excesses, such as his conduct on January 6, 2021" when his supporters rioted and invaded the Capitol when Congress was in the process of certifying President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 election.
Even another multi-millionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Ramaswamy, ran against him but folded his campaign early and became his unquestioning supporter, and at one rally compared Trump to George Washington, the Father of the Nation.
Recalling the fight for the party nomination, Trump said, "I had to compete with this guy, and I thought it was going to be easy, but it wasn't. He was nasty. He was quick. He's smart as hell."
"He did amazingly well, because he started really as a rookie, right? And he got up and he wiped a lot of very smart politicians off the stage," Trump said.
In a forum of Republican nomination candidates to which Trump did not come, Ramaswamy mounted the toughest attacks against Haley for her stance on support of aid for Ukraine.
Some other reports speculate that Ramaswamy does not even intend to serve in the administration and has his eye on the Ohio governor's seat to be up for election in 2026.
Pompeo had been widely rumoured to enter Trump's cabinet as Defence minister, but apparently didn't pass the loyalty test, despite endorsing Trump, because he had criticized him for holding on to classified documents after leaving the White House for which Trump was being prosecuted.
He and Haley are strong advocates for Ukraine, despite the fact that Trump hasn't been a fervent supporter and even touted he would end the invasion by Russia.
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