Nikki Haley Continues to Insist the US Has Never Been Racist, as Trump Launches Racist Attacks Against Her

On Thursday night, Nikki Haley continued to bizarrely drive home her belief that the United States, where it was once acceptable to own a person based on the color of their skin, has “never” been a racist country. Even as she’s been the subject of racist attacks by the front-runner for the GOP nomination!

When asked by Jake Tapper, during a CNN town hall, whether she stood by her remarks to Fox & Friends that the US is not, and has never been, racist, the GOP presidential hopeful responded by citing the Declaration of Independence, saying, “It was that men are created equal with unalienable rights, right? That was what we all knew.” While acknowledging that there was “plenty of racism” that her family had to deal with when she was growing up in South Carolina—a state that literally seceded from the Union over fears that Abraham Lincoln was going to make people stop enslaving others—she nevertheless declared, “I want every brown and Black child to…say, ‘No, I don’t live in a country that was formed on racism. I live in a country where they wanted all people to be equal and to make sure that they had life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

After Tapper pushed back, saying the US was quite clearly “founded institutionally on many racist precepts, including slavery,” Haley claimed that “the intent” behind America’s founding was “to do the right thing,” adding that she refused “to believe that the premise of when they formed our country was based on the fact that it was a racist country to start with.” This is obviously completely absurd given that, among other things, the US Constitution (1) acknowledged that certain people were not free and (2) decreed that each of those people, whose race you can probably guess, would be counted as only three fifths of a human.

Also absurd is the idea that the US does not currently have a racism problem, given that Haley herself has recently been the subject of racist attacks by the man expected to win the GOP nomination. When asked about Donald Trump’s circulation of a post falsely claiming that she was ineligible to be president because her parents were not citizens when she was born, as well as his decision to refer to her as “Nimrada”—

a misspelled version of Haley’s given name, Nimarata—the former governor told Tapper, “I know President Trump well. That’s what he does when he feels threatened; that’s what he does when he feels insecure.” She added: “I know that I am a threat. I know that’s why he’s doing that. So it’s not gonna waste any energy from me. I’m gonna continue to focus on the things that people want to talk about and not get into the name-calling back with him.”