Nikki Haley blasts DeSantis backer David Sacks for calling her a ‘Bush-era Republican’ beholden to corporate interests

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire— Just hours before Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign with billionaire backer David Sacks, Nikki Haley responded to Sacks’s criticism that she is a “Bush-era Republican” beholden to corporate interests during an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner.

“My record speaks for itself,” said the 2024 hopeful in response to Sacks, a prominent venture capitalist. “I have always disagreed with corporate bailouts, whether they’re banks or whether they’re anything else. I think that private companies should be allowed to fail, and I don’t think government needs to be all things to all people. And when it comes to Bush-era foreign policy, I don’t even know what that means. What I believe is that we should have a strong America that allows us to be safe abroad. We should be able to make sure that we have a strong foreign policy so that we prevent wars, not start wars.”

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Haley, an accountant by trade before entering politics, also blasted the Biden administration’s bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, which was infamously and vociferously endorsed by Sacks.

“When it comes to these banks, we need to make sure D.C. does a better job of making sure they have enough cash in their banks so that nothing like this ever happens,” said Haley of the third-largest bank failure in the nation’s history. “If you don’t do that, why are you going to have taxpayers bail them out? Yes, sometimes you have to let these banks fail. You have to do it. And I think that if they if they didn’t do what they were supposed to when they failed, I’m sorry for the depositors. But I don’t think the rest of America should have to pay for that.”

Haley also excoriates the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank for failing to crack down on SVB’s interest rate exposure.

“If you look at SVB, they were giving out risky loans, and these people who were getting loans knew that they couldn’t get them in any other bank,” said Haley. “Secondly, where was the San Francisco Fed? Their job is to oversee this. They saw what SVB was doing when [the bank] bought all these low interest loans and then they were investing it out. They were out cash, [the Fed] saw that, and nobody did anything. And how funny is it that the head of SVB bank is on the San Francisco [Fed] Board? At what point are you going to say the people that were in charge of holding them accountable didn’t do their job? So why should the taxpayers of America now have to bail out a bank, when the Fed didn’t hold them accountable?”

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Although DeSantis has blamed SVB’s collapse on “DEI,” or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, the Florida governor has not commented on Sacks’s role in the bank run that triggered SVB’s collapse or his advocacy for the bailout.