CNN host Brianna Keilar ripped into 2024 Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley on Wednesday morning for suggesting that liberals “hate America” and that the nation doesn’t have a racism problem, during a heavily promoted speech at the Ronald Reagan library in California on Tuesday.
“A large portion of our people are plagued by self-doubt or even by hatred of America,” Haley said during the speech. “It’s a pandemic much more damaging than any virus.”
Keilar said that Haley, whom she called a “Republican pinball machine,” was “not letting more than 700,000 COVID deaths and counting get in the way of minimizing a pandemic politicized by the administration she served.”
Keilar walked through Haley’s history with racism in South Carolina, where she served as governor before becoming former president Donald Trump’s ambassador to the U.N. Haley, an Indian-American, has said her parents faced discrimination when she was a child, and she was elected governor based partly on backlash over a GOP state senator calling former president Barack Obama a “raghead.” But later, Haley declined to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, even after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine people at a Charleston church — before changing her mind a week later.
“In last night’s speech, the former governor, who removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds, only to have that symbol brandished inside the U.S. Capitol by rioters this past January, whitewashed the ups and downs of the American experience with racism and the challenges still ahead, all apparently to appeal to the conservative base,” Keilar said.
She added that Haley was “courting the followers of Donald Trump,” who told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” called predominantly black and brown nations “shithole countries” and said there were “fine people on both sides” following a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
Keilar also pointed to Haley’s comments criticizing Trump in the wake of the insurrection, in which she said his actions “will be judged harshly by history.”
“Shortly after that, Haley softened her criticism,” Keilar said. “She even tried to go to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, but was reportedly denied. Now she may be right that history will judge Donald Trump harshly, but NIkki Haley will not, because she’s too busy trying to ride his coattails.”
Watch below.