Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley fired back at President Biden Monday, hours after the 81-year-old commander in chief indirectly rebuked the former South Carolina governor in her home state for failing to specify slavery as the cause for the Civil War. 

Haley slammed Biden during a town hall moderated by Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum in Des Moines, Iowa, for holding a campaign event at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC – the site of a June 2015 racially-motivated mass shooting in which nine black churchgoers were murdered by white supremacist Dylann Roof. 

“For Biden to show up there and give a political speech is offensive in itself,” Haley said. 

The former United Nations ambassador then lit up Biden for his past associations with segregationists and his history of “racist comments.” 

“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 fumed. 

In May 2022, Biden fondly reminisced about “the old days” in the US. Senate when he was able to sit down and have lunch with “real segregationists” in Washington, despite disagreeing with them.

The president named former segregationist Sens. James Eastland (D-Miss.) and Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) as the lawmakers he “used to fight like hell” with before “eating lunch together,” during a speech at a manufacturing plant in Hamilton, Ohio. 

Biden told the same anecdote a month later during an annual picnic with members of Congress on the White House lawn. 

The president was even taken to task by his eventual running mate, Kamala Harris, during a June 2019 debate for praising Eastland and segregationist Sen. Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.) earlier that month. 

“I do not believe you are racist,” Harris told Biden. “But I also believe, and it is personal — it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and careers on the segregation of race in this country.”

Biden later apologized, saying that he regretted giving “the impression to people that I was praising those men” 

Before Monday’s town hall, the Haley campaign pointed to Biden’s opposition in the 1970s to court-ordered busing; his 2007 description of then-Sen. Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; his 2006  “you cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent” remark; and his 2019  “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” gaffe as examples of the president’s past racist comments.

Biden on Monday called it a “lie” that the Civil War was about states’ rights.

“So let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War,” he said. “There’s no negotiation about that.”

Haley also called for Biden to be “fired” over the mysterious situation involving Defense Secretary  Lloyd Austin, who checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on New Year’s Day without telling the White House and transferred his duties to deputy secretary Kathleen Hicks –  who was on vacation in Puerto Rico – while he was incapacitated.

The president only learned of Austin’s hospitalization last Thursday, according to a CNN report. 

“I think Biden should be fired,” Haley said. “This is unbelievable that we have a situation like this.”

“First, I have a problem with the fact that Biden is not talking to his secretary of defense every single day anyway,” she said. “Secondly, is there not enough connection that he didn’t even know he was put in the hospital in intensive care at that? And then to go and say, ‘Oh, but his deputy secretary knew what was going on’ but she is vacationing in Puerto Rico? There are so many things wrong with this.”

The White House and Pentagon said Austin, 70, resumed his duties on Friday from Walter Reed.