Sunny Hostin scolds fellow 'View' host for saying she backs Nikki Haley: 'You can't support her'
"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin groaned on Tuesday after Alyssa Farah Griffin announced she would support GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley in the primary, and said, "you can't support her."
The co-hosts discussed backlash against Haley over her answer to a question about what caused the Civil War, which did not initially include mentioning slavery. Haley addressed the backlash shortly after and said slavery was the "first thing" she should have said.
Hostin, who once accused Haley of being a "chameleon" by suggesting Haley tried to hide her Indian ethnicity, groaned and said, "no," after Griffin said she would still support Haley in the primary.
"It just shows you who she is, and when someone, Maya Angelou said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time," Hostin said before accusing Haley of being a "hypocrite."
"Can I just say this? This is not the first time she has been a hypocrite. She said, ‘I, as a South Carolina governor, took down the Confederate flag.’ Nikki Haley, you took down that flag because you were forced to. Because I was there covering that shooting in South Carolina when all those people were murdered by Dylann Roof," Hostin said.
"So you can kiss my grits when you try to say some nonsense about you don’t — ‘You should have said slavery. Everybody knows slavery.’ She didn’t say it intentionally because 85 percent of Republicans are White," Hostin continued.
Griffin pushed back and said that most White Americans did not want to "whitewash slavery."
"You can’t support her. You’re rational," Hostin said to Griffin.
GOP VOTERS APPEAR UNBOTHERED BY NIKKI HALEY'S CIVIL WAR GAFFE: ‘PILE OF BULLS---’
Griffin argued she was worried about Donald Trump becoming president.
"I have rung the alarm bells. I’m not convinced Joe Biden can beat him," she said. "Nikki Haley is not a threat to democracy."
Co-host Joy Behar confidently said President Biden would beat Trump in the 2024 election. Hostin appeared to agree and said, "He will."
A voter asked Haley what she believed was "the cause" of the war during a recent campaign event.
"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," she said at the event.
"I mean, I think it all comes down to the role of government," she added. "We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way."
Responding to the criticism of her response, Haley said, "The first thing I should have said was slavery."
"I completely agree with that. When you grow up in the South, slavery is a given. Like when you think of the Civil War, you know it was about slavery. That's never been in question," she continued.
Fox News' Madeline Coggins contributed to this report.