Haley appears to mix up CNN anchor and Iowa women’s basketball star

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley appeared to mix up a CNN anchor and a college women’s basketball star in a clip posted Saturday.

According to The Des Moines Register, Haley was speaking to a crowd in Coralville, Iowa, before the University of Iowa women’s basketball game Saturday when the incident occurred. 

“[W]e’re super excited to see the Lady Hawkeyes play, what a team they are, what a great coach they have,” Haley said in the clip posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Kaitlan Collins is phenomenal.”

There is no “Kaitlan Collins” on the University of Iowa women’s basketball team roster. However, there is a “Caitlin Clark,” who is a star on the Hawkeyes team.

Earlier this year, the Hawkeyes were the runner-ups of the NCAA Division I women’s basketball national championship game. 

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins appeared to joke about Haley’s apparent mix-up in her own X post.

“I can assure you her free-throw percentage is much better than mine,” Collins said, referencing Clark.

Haley’s gafe follows another she made at a town hall in the Granite State this week in which she did not mention slavery as a cause for the Civil War. 

“Well, don’t come with an easy question, right,” Haley said at an event in Berlin, N.H., after being asked about the cause of the Civil War. “I mean, 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.”

Fellow GOP primary candidate Ron DeSantis came after Haley over her answer on Thursday.

“The minute that she faces any type of scrutiny, she tends to cave. And I think that that’s what you saw yesterday,” he said. “It’s not that difficult to identify and acknowledge the role slavery played in the Civil War.”

“You’re going to get asked a lot of tough questions. That’s just the nature of this business,” he continued. “And I think that she shows time and time again that when the lights get hot, that she wilts under pressure, and that was a good example last night.”