Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley alleged Thursday that the audience member who asked her about the Civil War at a town hall was a “Democrat plant.”
At a town hall in New Hampshire on Wednesday, an audience member asked Haley what caused the Civil War. The cause, Haley responded, “was basically how government was going to run the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”
She then spoke about liberty, individual rights, and government — a response for which the audience member was apparently prepared.
“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answered that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery,'” the audience member told Haley.
“What do you want me to say about slavery?” she responded.
“You answered my question, thank you,” the man replied.
Nikki Haley is acting as if “what was the cause of the Civil War?” is a difficult gotcha question?
It’s one of the easiest questions to answer! pic.twitter.com/0swf2Mxtfm
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) December 28, 2023
In a Thursday interview with a New Hampshire radio show, Haley responded to the bipartisan whiplash over her answer and acknowledged the obvious.
“Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” she said, going on to clarify why she spoke about individual rights and the role of government. “Yes, I know it was about slavery. I’m from the South.”
The former South Carolina governor then alleged the audience member was planted by President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to make her look bad.
“Biden and the Democrats keep sending Democrat plants to do things like this, to get the media to react. We know when they’re there. We know what they’re doing,” she said.
According to Haley, the Democratic Party machine is targeting her because they believe she will handily defeat Biden in a general election and therefore want to sink her campaign to ensure that Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination.
Haley, moreover, claimed she recognized the audience member as a “plant,” which is why she tried to turn the question around on him.
“It was definitely a Democrat plant,” she said. “That’s why I said, ‘What does it mean to you?’ And if you notice, he didn’t answer anything. The same reason he didn’t tell the reporters what his name was. The same reason he went and showed the guy that he was with the tweet that went up after he did it.
“We see these guys when they come [to our events]. We know what they’re doing, and we know from the second they ask the question. If you look at the last swing I did in New Hampshire, there was one at every single town hall. This is what they do. And I’m trying to turn the questions back on them,” she said.
Haley, however, did not offer any evidence to back her claims.
According to the New Hampshire Journal, the audience member later told reporters that he asked the question because he knew that Haley was asked the same question more than a decade ago and wanted to see how she would answer today.
Desantis’s response
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis responded to Haley’s “incomprehensible word salad” while on the campaign trail in Iowa, saying that it showed she “is not a candidate that’s ready for primetime.”
“And she’s gotten a pretty free ride from a lot of the corporate press,” DeSantis said. “The minute that she faces any type of scrutiny, she tends to cave and I think that that’s what you saw yesterday. Not that difficult to identify and acknowledge the role slavery played in the Civil War, and yet that seemed to be something that was really difficult. And I don’t even know what she was saying.”
“I know she’s trying to clean it up. I know she’s tried to blame a Democrat plant,” he continued. “I mean, you’re gonna get asked a lot of tough questions — that’s just the nature of this business. And I think that she showed time and time again that when the lights get hot that she will wilt under pressure, and that was a good example last night.”
https://twitter.com/aaronlarnavarro/status/1740441833237266907
Asked what his answer would be to the question Haley got, DeSantis answered, “You have the issue of slavery; you have the states that were concerned about Lincoln interfering and potentially eliminating it and they viewed it as a states’ rights issue, not as a federal issue and they were concerned that you have this Republican president, may come in and get rid of the institution of slavery. It’s interesting because the Republican Party was founded to put a stop to the growth of slavery in this country and the abolition of slavery was, to this day, remains the party’s top achievement. And it was a partisan achievement because the people that were fighting Lincoln, the people that wanted to preserve slavery, they were Democrats. And so the Republican Party did that, and that’s something that you should acknowledge and be proud of as a Republican.”
Vivek’s response
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy responded to Haley’s remarks in a series of posts on X, writing: “The shocking part isn’t that Nikki failed to mention slavery. It’s that she failed to mention the 10th amendment. When you try to be everything to everyone, you’re nothing to anyone. A perfect puppet for the corrupt establishment.”
The shocking part isn’t that Nikki failed to mention slavery. It’s that she failed to mention the 10th amendment. When you try to be everything to everyone, you’re nothing to anyone. A perfect puppet for the corrupt establishment.
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 28, 2023
Ramaswamy also highlighted when Haley asked what the questioner wanted her to say about slavery.
“I think she mistook him for a Super PAC donor,” Ramaswamy said.
“Turns out Nikki knows as little about the Civil War as she does about the Ukraine War,” he added. “But whatever war it was, I’m sure she’s in favor of it. 💵”
