The morning after GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley sparked widespread mockery for failing to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War, the denizens of Fox News’ flagship morning show dutifully came to her rescue and claimed she “handled it quite well.”
It didn’t stop there, either. The hosts of Fox & Friends also wondered whether the questioner who confronted Haley at a town hall was a “plant” trying to create a “gotcha moment,” echoing the same excuse the former South Carolina governor floated on Thursday morning.
Speaking to New Hampshire voters on Wednesday evening, Haley was asked by one attendee why she thought the Civil War was fought, only for her to assert that the conflict was about “how government was going to run” and “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” After the questioner said he found it “astonishing” that she omitted slavery, Haley shrugged while dismissively retorting: “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
The moment quickly went viral on social media, prompting the 2024 candidate to soon go into spin mode to quell the growing backlash. During a Thursday morning radio appearance, Haley said “of course” the war was about slavery before insisting she was set up by a stooge sent by President Joe Biden’s campaign.
“Biden and the Democrats keep sending Democrat plants to do things like this, to get the media to react,” Haley grumbled, adding: “It was definitely a Democrat plant.”
With her campaign scrambling to contain the fallout over the fiasco, Fox News—which has seemingly settled on Haley as the best potential non-Trump alternative in the GOP field—soon rallied to the former U.N. ambassador’s defense.
Stocked with a cadre of guest hosts due to the holidays, the network’s narrative-setting morning program Fox & Friends came up with a laundry list of reasons why Haley’s flub really wasn’t all that bad. Besides cleaning up Haley’s mess for her, the crew also managed to take swipes at Biden over the debacle.
While acknowledging that Haley has “to see questions like that coming,” co-host Johnny Joey Jones said he didn’t think Haley was “trying to lighten the effect of slavery on our country” with her response.
“I think when you are an intellectual and you read books like Team of Rivals, you read the memoirs and the actual texts of our country at that time, it was about slavery and a whole bunch of other things,” Jones continued. “And I think she was trying to encapsulate that. But on the campaign trail, less in an academic environment, you have got to see that coming [and] you’ve got to answer that better. I don’t think in any way she was trying to say slavery wasn’t a big part if not the cause of the Civil War.”
Jones’ colleague Griff Jenkins, meanwhile, offered up a full-throated defense of Haley, harkening back to her decision as South Carolina governor to remove the state’s Confederate flag following Dylan Roof’s racist mass murder of Black parishioners.
“If the implication is that she wouldn’t condemn the evils of slavery, they failed miserably,” Jenkins huffed. “This is a governor, in the wake of a massacre of black residents in AME Church in Charleston, out of that disaster and tragedy she then had the political courage to drop—in one of the most Southern of all states—the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds and took immense heat for it. To say that she isn’t willing and doesn’t have the moral fortitude and political courage to stand and condemn the evils of slavery is embarrassing on the face of it!”
Notably, the man who confronted Haley about the Civil War told reporters that he’d asked her that question to see if she’d changed her views since seemingly defending secession 13 years ago. During a 2010 interview with a Southern heritage activist group with ties to white nationalism, Haley said the Confederate flag wasn’t “racist,” stood up for the right of states to secede, and described the Civil War as being about “tradition versus change.”
Jenkins then groused about Biden’s reaction to Haley’s botch.
“Yet, that didn’t stop Caribbean-vacationing President Biden from saying it was about slavery. As if you’re scoring a point,” he snarked. “We don’t know, by the way, who asked that question. Was that a plant? Was that a random question?”
Picking up where her colleague left off, co-host Carley Shimkus wondered whether it was a Democrat, “somebody who is supporting Donald Trump,” or just a “Republican who doesn’t like Nikki Haley” who pressed her about the Civil War. At the same time, she gave Haley credit for supposedly trying to provide a more complex answer to the question.
“It clearly was trying to be a gotcha moment for her, to take her out of her normal political conversation. She’s going to talk about the economy, going to talk about the border,” Shimkus said. “To me, this read pretty clear. It was that the answer of slavery is so obvious. That’s the obvious answer. She was saying, she was talking about big government and other things. Clearly, the answer is slavery. She was trying to give him a more educated philosophical response.”
Jenkins ended up putting the cherry on top by fawning over the way that Haley handled the entire situation.
“She couldn’t have actually handled it better,” he declared. “She is thinking, ‘Is this a gotcha question? Are you trying to imply that I won’t condemn the evils of slavery?’ Perhaps in her head. ‘Or is this about the actual nuances of what the Civil War was fought over, which is about the economics and politics from the state vs. federal government level of issues like slavery?’ And in that moment, I think she handled it quite well considering and didn’t give in to what would clearly, as you point out, a gotcha question.”
