“Don’t come with an easy question,” GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley responds, after a pause, when she is asked to name the cause of the American Civil War.
In a video that has been viewed more than 10 million times, Haley, who has been brushing up her MAGA bona fides on the campaign trail, replies that she thinks the Civil War was “about how government was going to run…the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
Seemingly flustered, Haley then turns the question back on the inquirer, who demurs, saying that he is not running for President — the presumption being that what he thinks isn’t the issue. What a candidate for POTUS thinks is.
The Biden campaign jumped on Haley’s response, asserting that it is an easy question. Biden considered it so simple that he gave a one-word answer — a single overarching cause — captioning his share of the video with this: “It was about slavery.”
It was about slavery. https://t.co/q9bTDvtPne
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 28, 2023
Haley clearly didn’t wish to mention slavery, instead saying: “I think it always comes down to the role of government. We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
The Biden campaign also shared the DNC War Room response, which read: “This is what a MAGA extremist sounds like.”
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