Nikki Haley stumped by trick question: What was the cause of the Civil War?

Nikki Haley, supposedly getting traction in New Hampshire, stepped on her own, whatever, tripped up by a hard question from what she seems to think is a Democratic plant.

The hard question: what was the cause of the United States Civil War?

Some mean trick, asking that question.

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley answered at a Wednesday town hall, afraid to say the quiet part out loud, because, you know, woke.

Seriously, she was afraid if she said the obvious part out loud – that the Civil War was fought, not over “freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” but over slavery – she might offend the MAGA base, which is damn sick and tired of this wokeness nonsense.

And then, she stepped on, you know, her whatever a second time, telling a New Hampshire radio host on Thursday that “of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s the easy part of it. “

Did you see what she did there? After so obviously kowtowing to the far right in her first answer, she conceded the woke point, losing the MAGAs in the process, while not exactly endearing herself to the rest of the electorate – defined as, those among us who don’t tingle up at thoughts of the Reichstag burning to the ground.

She tried to straddle the line with this word salad:

“What I was saying was, what does it mean us today?” Haley said. “What it means to us today is about freedom. That’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom, economic freedom, individual rights. Our goal is to make sure we never go back to the stain of slavery, but what’s the lesson in all of that?”

Even Ron DeSantis, the dark knight of anti-woke, piled on at this stage.

“Not that difficult to identify and acknowledge the role slavery played in the Civil War, and yet that seemed to be something that was really difficult,” DeSantis said. “I don’t even know what she was saying. If you listen to that answer, I know she’s trying to clean it up, I know she’s trying to blame a Democrat plant. Look, I mean, you’re going to get asked a lot of questions, I mean, you’re gonna get asked a lot of tough questions. That’s just the nature of this business. And I think that she’s shown time and time again that when it’s time, when the lights get hot, that she wilts under pressure.”

It’s not a good day when DeSanctimonious is dunking on you.

Noticeably silent through all of this: Donald Trump.

The sound you hear is him thumbing through his crayon-annotated Mein Kampf, searching desperately for the section on what the Civil War was about.