Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley criticized President Joe Biden on Monday night for giving a “political speech” at a South Carolina church where nine Black people were killed in a racist shooting, further accusing Biden of having a long history of making racist remarks.
The former South Carolina governor made the comments during a town hall in Fox News in Des Moines, Iowa, after Biden spoke at Mother Emanuel—the AME church in Charleston where parishioners were murdered by a white supremacist gunman in 2015. “For Biden to show up there and give a political speech is offensive in itself,” Haley said.
The former United Nations ambassador also responded to a jibe Biden made during his speech referencing Haley’s failure to mention slavery when asked about the causes of the Civil War. “Let me be clear for those who don’t seem to know—slavery was the cause of the Civil War,” Biden said Monday. “There’s no negotiation about that.”
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“I don’t need someone who palled around with segregationists in the ’70s and has said racist comments all the way through his career lecturing me or anyone in South Carolina about what it means to have racism, slavery, or anything related to the Civil War,” Haley said.
Haley has previously tried to defend herself in her Civil War fiasco by describing the man who originally asked her about the conflict as a “Democrat plant” and saying she “had Black friends growing up.”
Following Biden’s speech, Haley’s campaign sent a timeline out to reporters called “Biden’s Racial Comments and Actions,” according to the Associated Press, which included a 1974 quote in which Biden referred to himself as being like a “token Black” in the Senate, and a 1981 instance in which he’d said George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama, had sometimes been “right about some things.”
Haley’s criticisms came after Biden’s speech at Mother Emanuel was interrupted by protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. “If you really care about the lives lost here, you should honor the lives lost and call for a cease-fire in Gaza,” one protester yelled. Biden assured the demonstrators that he understands their “passion” and added that he’d been “quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza, using all that I can to do that.”
