DeSantis echoes Haley, saying US ‘is not a racist country’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argued Tuesday night that the United States “is not a racist country,” following GOP presidential primary rival Nikki Haley’s similar remarks earlier in the day.

DeSantis was asked during a New Hampshire CNN town hall about comments Haley made earlier Tuesday during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” where she said the U.S. has “never been a racist country” in response to a question on whether the GOP was a “racist party.” 

“Well, the U.S. is not a racist country, and we’ve overcome things in our history,” DeSantis responded. “You know, I think the Founding Fathers — they established a set of principles that are, that are universal.”

“Now they may not have been universally applied at the time, but I think they understood what they were doing. They understood that those principles would be the engine for progress for generations to come,” he said.

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer pressed him further on whether he agreed with Haley “that the U.S. has never been a racist country,” DeSantis fell short of completely agreeing with her.

“Well, what I said was we’ve had challenges with, with how race was viewed,” DeSantis said Tuesday. “And so, for example, those were universal principles in the Declaration of Independence. And you had a decision in the 1850s — the Dred Scott case said Dred Scott, because he was Black, wasn’t an American citizen. That was wrong. That was discriminating on the basis of race.”

“That’s why you ended up having the 14th Amendment ratified to overturn Dred Scott. So yes, we’ve had challenges with how we’ve dealt with race as a society,” he added.

Despite conceding the U.S. has faced issues when discussing race, DeSantis still argued that the country is the “best place” to pursue dreams.

“You have one place you want to grow up and have the most opportunity; it doesn’t matter your background, this is the best place to grow up and to pursue your dreams of any place in the entire world,” he said.

A spokesperson for Haley’s campaign defended the former South Carolina governor’s comments in the wake of her “Fox & Friends” appearance, emphasizing that there was a difference between the U.S. being a “racist country” and recognizing that racism has always existed.

“America has always had racism, but America has never been a racist country,” Haley spokesperson AnnMarie Graham-Barnes said in the statement.