(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) Making a pitch to voters in a CNN televised Town Hall, even Nikki Haley seemed unwilling to fully go along with the Election 2020 corporate media spin narrative.
Haley, the ex-South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador under former President Donald Trump, has generally staked out the GOP establishment lane as a 2024 presidential candidate.
During the Sunday evening event, she declined to backtrack about her January 6-related criticism of Trump when host Jake Tapper took a walk down memory lane.
When Tapper went on to assert that Trump continues “to lie” about the outcome of the election, however, Haley opted to educate the CNN anchor on the critical issue of making sure that every legal vote counts, even if she likely didn’t go far enough to satisfy the MAGA coalition.
During his questioning, Tapper disparaged “debunked” election-fraud conspiracy theories, which is ironic on a network that traffics in various such theories, that perhaps may have prompted Trump to famously describe the channel as “fake news.”
“I think it’s important that voters want to have election integrity. That’s the biggest thing,” Halley told Tapper.
Recalling her U.N. experience, Haley then noted that “There’s nothing worse than when a country and their citizens don’t trust the election system.”
Insofar as 2020 in the U.S. was concerned, “So when you look at what happened, you had mail-out balloting that we know was happening,” Haley said. “We know that there was harvesting that was happening. And then you had secretaries of state that did things without approval from their legislature.”
She continued: “Those are pretty serious…none of that would have changed the results of the election. We know that President Biden is the president, but I do think it goes to say we need to continue to have election integrity laws…”
Referencing her experience as South Carolina’s chief executive, Haley strongly backed the requirement to show a government-issued photo identification to vote despite left-wing gaslighting about voter disenfranchisement.
“If you’ve got to show picture ID to by Sudafed, if you got to show picture ID to get on a plane, you should have to show picture ID to protect the integrity of the election process.”
The statement even prompted applause from the CNN studio audience.
Aligned with Democrats, much of the corporate media insists that raising legitimate questions about the conduct of the 2020 election is a no-go zone, subject to censorship (at least until recently), unpatriotic, a threat to democracy, or perhaps illegal, which is the complete opposite of their 2016 position.
The town hall also saw Haley criticize rival Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and GOP presidential candidate, over the legal wrangling with woke Disney, the former family-friendly entertainment conglomerate.
“Here you have DeSantis, who accepted $50,000 in political contributions from Disney. He went and put their executives and their lobbyists on prominent boards throughout Florida. And he went and basically gave the highest corporate subsidies in Florida history to Disney,” Haley said. “But because they went and criticized him, now he’s gonna to spend taxpayer dollars on a lawsuit. It’s just like all this vendetta stuff…we can’t go down that [road]…”
Nikki Haley called out Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for what she characterized as wasting time and money on a personal "vendetta" against Disney. https://t.co/lv4nYyTZEU pic.twitter.com/ynurBy8rmI
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 5, 2023
Tapper also called attention to the fact that Haley is much more of a Ukraine war hawk than Trump or DeSantis.
Nikki Haley says backing Ukraine is about protecting freedom and stopping tyranny worldwide, setting stark contrast with her former boss Donald Trump.
Follow updates and watch the CNN town hall. https://t.co/PubMnOSnzX pic.twitter.com/CIp6X5y7nY
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 5, 2023
Trump is currently the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican nomination. Much speculation has emerged that the GOP presidential field is widening, however, because political strategists working for ambitious candidates anticipate that POTUS 45’s legal woes could take him out of the race.
Last month, Trump temporarily boosted CNN’s lackluster viewership by appearing on the channel for a compelling town hall.
