At a bar lined with indoor golf simulators in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Nalin Haley is posing for pictures with a procession of starstruck twentysomethings in blazers.
It’s a humid evening in late March and we are at the kickoff event for the Tri-County Young Republicans, the organization that Nalin, the 24-year-old son of former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, launched in February. Featured guests include gubernatorial candidate Ralph Norman and state senator Wes Climer. Several have driven hours to get here. And Nalin appears to be the main attraction.
“He’s a rising star,” Matthew Carlyon, a 21-year-old campaign staffer for Norman, told me. “I think he’s going to get into politics one day.”
A day earlier, Nalin assured me that wasn’t on his mind: “People who plan that far ahead are kind of psychotic.” But in the past year, while working a finance job outside Charlotte, he has quickly become a poster boy for the young, post-Trump right that believe the system is rigged and the old guard has failed.
In November, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and argued, among other things, that naturalized immigrants should not be able to hold public office and that dual citizenship should be illegal. A little more than a week later on Fox & Friends, he urged Republicans to reject “free market neoliberalism” to win over Gen Z. A recent X post, calling for a shift away from foreign wars to domestic spending, amassed 29,000 likes. (He has over 42,000 followers on the platform.) Even former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino is a fan.
