Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has had a rough stretch in front of the microphones recently – she didn’t appear to help herself on Monday night.
At a town hall event in Iowa hosted by Fox News, Haley denounced Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for recent attacks that linked Haley to Hillary Clinton.
Haley denied, contrary to what the DeSantis camp has recently highlighted, that she drew inspiration to enter politics from Clinton.
“DeSantis is desperate. He’s lying because he’s losing,” she told hosts Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier. “The problem is if you have to lie to win, you don’t deserve to win.”
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“I never said Hillary Clinton was an inspiration. What I said when I was talking to a group of women, who were looking at running for office, I said the same thing about her that I said about Sarah Palin. And that is when I was looking to run, everybody told me why I couldn’t do it.”
Haley then recalled that she attended a women’s leadership forum at Furman University in South Carolina, where Clinton was a featured speaker.
“I have never agreed with a single thing Hillary Clinton has ever said and I said that, too. But Ron forgot to put that in the ad,” Haley continued. “But what I’ll tell you is, she ended it by saying, for every reason they tell you not to run, that’s exactly the reason you should. And I left there and said that’s it. I’m running for office. I had never been politically active. I had never been involved in politics.”
“But I’ll say that’s the problem with politicians. Rather than talking about what they can do, they just want to talk up and make things up that I — that they are saying that I said.”
The problem for Haley, however, is that she is on tape saying it.
On X, DeSantis War Room, the account belonging to the governor’s media team, posted a video. In the clip, Haley clearly says, “I often say that the reason I got into politics was because of Hillary Clinton.”
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As the clip continues, Haley says she didn’t know Clinton, but had met her years earlier.
She then seems to recall that women’s political forum, and notes, “At that event, she inspired me to run for office and make my voice heard.”
That was apparently a quote from Haley’s 2019 memoir, “With All Due Respect.”
In still another clip, Haley is shown saying, “She is actually the reason I made the jump” into politics.
Later in the video, when a reporter mentioned that Haley saw Clinton as a “big inspiration,” she again recalled Clinton’s appearance at Furman and noted that she decided to run for office after Clinton’s speech.
DeSantis War Room then posted reminders of Haley’s other recent flubs, including her gaffe about slavery not causing the Civil War, her saying New Hampshire voters needed to “correct” the outcome in Iowa, and confusing Iowa Hawkeyes basketball star Caitlin Clark with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins.
In one item DeSantis did not reference, Haley last week, while on the hot seat for the slavery miscue, tried to wriggle out of it by saying she “had black friends growing up.”
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