Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley plugged her website documenting rival Ron DeSantis’s “lies” 16 times during CNN’s GOP presidential debate Wednesday.
The effort by Haley was intended to call attention to mistruths by the Florida governor, but it was a tactic that also garnered criticism from pundits and online as the mentions of desantislies.com kept coming.
“What we’re going to do is rather than have him go and tell you all these lies, you can go to desantislies.com and look at all of those,” Haley said early on in the two candidates’ head-to-head showdown. “There is at least two dozen lies that he has told about me, and you can see where a fact-checker says exactly what’s going to happen and exactly why it’s wrong.”
At 15 other points in the two-hour program, Haley name-dropped “desantislies.com,” according to rush transcripts provided by the network.
She interjected DeSantis’s answer to one immigration-related question by quipping, “That is not true: desantislies.com.”
“It’s a shame that we had to put up desantislies.com. Honestly, if he would spend as much time trying to prove why he thinks he would be a good president, he would be doing a lot better in the polls,” she said at another point.
DeSantis after the event knocked Haley’s accusations of lying.
“I think her response, just constantly say ‘you’re lying,’ does not pass that smell test,” he told CNN in a post-debate interview.
The one-on-one debate was heated, as Haley and DeSantis battle for second place in a GOP presidential field led by former President Trump, who qualified for the stage but skipped the Wednesday clash to hold his own town hall.
The debate comes just days before the critical Iowa caucuses kick off the Republican presidential nominating cycle. DeSantis and Haley have been crisscrossing the state in the run-up to voting, and the Florida governor has invested heavily in the Hawkeye State.
But with Trump polling as the clear front-runner in the state, observers are looking to the second and third place results as signals of whether Haley or DeSantis stands out as the top Trump alternative moving forward.