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Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley's remarks about the Bud Light controversy was met with silence in New Hampshire on Wednesday after she took a jab at transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
"Everybody knows about Dylan Mulvaney? Bud Light, right?" Haley asked the audience at a Politics & Egg series. "Make no mistake. That is a guy, dressed up like a girl, making fun of women. Women don't act like that. Yet, everybody's wondering why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year?"
Politics & Eggs is a program hosted by Saint Anselm College aimed at providing "New Hampshire and New England business leaders with a chance to meet with major party presidential candidates," according to the school's website. Boasted as a "must-stop" on the campaign trail, the series says "virtually ever major candidate" has attended the Q&A events.
Caught in the middle of the nation's culture wars, Mulvaney and her paid partnership with Bud Light have been the center of an anti-trans firestorm. Her post promoting the beer brand was met with widespread backlash from conservatives and with calls to boycott all products from Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light's parent company.
On Tuesday, Haley used the recent controversy to highlight her platform on LGBTQ+ rights, arguing that the debate over transgender athletes is "the women's issue of our time."
"How do we get our girls comfortable with biological boys in their locker room?" she asked. "It's not OK."
A number of Republican-led states, including South Carolina, have enacted bans preventing transgender athletes from performing on women's and girls' sports teams. Haley was the governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017 before she served as former President Donald Trump's United Nations ambassador until 2018.
David Weigel, a politics reporter at Semafor, noted that while Haley's comment didn't receive any applause on Wednesday, it would have done well with a GOP base crowd. Given that the speech series is geared to businessmen and nonprofit leaders, "no applause for a line that gets some elsewhere," he tweeted.
Haley's remarks about "wokeness" in the military, however, did receive applause.
Newsweek reached out to Haley's campaign via email for comment.
Although Haley is not expected to be Trump's most formidable challenger in the 2024 Republican primaries, her campaign is still seen as a competitive rival. FiveThirtyEight has her polling average at 4.2 percent. Comparably, Trump has 53.5 percent support and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to announce his candidacy on Wednesday night, is backed by 20.8 percent of GOP voters.
On Wednesday, Haley was asked by event attendees about her stance on Ukraine and abortion. She refused to give President Joe Biden credit for the NATO response to the Ukraine-Russia War, arguing that the U.S. "could have prevented" the conflict, and said that she would sign a federal abortion ban if it received the necessary 60 votes in the Senate but noted "we're not anywhere near there."
About the writer
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek senior reporter based in New York City. She has covered U.S. politics and culture extensively. ... Read more