President Donald Trump has found an unlikely ally in his old political rival’s son.
Nalin Haley, 24, the youngest child of Nikki Haley—Trump’s final Republican challenger in the 2024 primary—is making a name for himself as one of MAGA’s up-and-coming young voices.
While the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador ran on a more traditional Republican platform, Nalin has come out swinging against several of his mother’s more moderate views.
Nalin told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that he aligns most closely with Vice President JD Vance’s policies and would back him as a candidate in the 2028 presidential election if he can “somehow work on his charisma, aura and likability.”
Despite campaigning alongside his mother during the 2024 race, Nalin—who majored in political science at Villanova University—said he was simply being a “good son” and was “never going to be an advocate for a view that I did not have.”
As he’s stepped into public life, Nalin has broken sharply with several of Nikki Haley’s long-held positions. While Nikki, whose parents are Indian immigrants, has supported legal pathways to the United States, Nalin told the British news site UnHerd earlier this month, “I think we need to stop legal immigration.” Last week, he also wrote on X that the U.S. should “end H1-B visas.”
Just last week, Nalin argued in an interview with Tucker Carlson that naturalized citizens—such as New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—should be barred from holding public office.
Nikki has been a fierce advocate for Israel, while Nalin told UnHerd that “Israel is just another country” and that it needs to stop “interfering in our politics.”
Nikki told the Journal she was “proud of the strong, intelligent people” Nalin and his 27-year-old sister Rena have become. “Our goal was to teach our children to have a deep faith, a strong work ethic and to think for themselves,” she said.
Research over decades has shown that the vast majority of American families pass on their political loyalties. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that eight in ten parents who were Republican or leaned Republican (81 percent) had teens who also identified as or leaned Republican. And about nine-in-ten Democratic or Democratic-leaning parents (89 percent) had teens aligned 9-in-10 Democratic or Democratic-leaning parents (89 percent) had teens aligned with them.
But Nalin’s divergence from his mother’s politics is far from the only break within a prominent political family in recent years.
Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway dominated headlines in 2020 as her daughter Claudia amassed millions of views on TikTok as a 15-year-old, slamming her mother’s politics and declaring she was seeking emancipation after learning Kellyanne would speak at the Republican National Convention. Kellyanne eventually resigned from the White House to focus on her “beloved children.”
The Kennedy family has long condemned the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary. His sister, Kerry Kennedy, and his nephew, Joe Kennedy III, publicly called for his resignation after RFK Jr.’s disastrous September hearing before the U.S. Senate. Just this weekend, John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg admonished Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an essay revealing that she has less than a year to live following a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Top Trump aide Stephen Miller is also no stranger to family estrangement. Last month, his first cousin publicly disowned him for becoming “the face of evil” as the architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration crackdown. And in 2018, his uncle David Glosser penned a scathing essay for Politico in which he described Miller as an “immigration hypocrite.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Nikki and Nalin Haley for comment.
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