SC Gov. Haley to Donald Trump: ‘Bless your heart’
A day after S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley called him out for not releasing his tax returns, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump blasted her on Twitter for a 2012 video that shows her dismissing calls for the public release of taxes as a “political ploy.”
On the eve of the critical Super Tuesday primaries, Haley took the lead Monday at an Atlanta rally for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who had lost his voice on the campaign trail. Haley hammered Trump for his business bankruptcies, for refusing to release his tax returns, and for not denouncing white supremacist groups backing his campaign.
“I’m an accountant; I’m telling you there’s no audit that precludes you from showing your tax return,” said Haley, who has an accounting degree, adding to cheers from the crowd, “Donald Trump, show us your tax return.”
It didn’t take long for Trump to hit back on Twitter.
“The people of South Carolina are embarrassed of Nikki Haley!” he tweeted on Tuesday, after deleting the first version that misspelled the governor’s last name as “Hailey.”
Haley had a very Southern response for the New York billionaire Tuesday, tweeting at him directly: “Bless your heart.”
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and social media director Dan Scavino also tweeted a video of a 2012 interview in which Haley dismissed the importance of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney releasing his tax returns.
“Those are distractions,” Haley told a Daily Caller reporter in the video. “I saw it in my race, they always say ‘Show me your tax returns’ just so they can start throwing holes in it. I think that that will be (Romney’s) decision to make but that’s nothing but a political ploy.”
Trump’s pushback comes after Haley also condemned his Sunday interview on CNN, where he repeatedly was asked whether he would disavow the Ku Klux Klan and former grand wizard David Duke.
"I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists," Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper. "So I don’t know. I don’t know – did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists."
At the Rubio rally in Atlanta, Haley spoke about her experience with similar groups when she backed the removal of the Confederate flag from the S.C. State House following the slaying of nine black congregants at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church by a white supremacist.
“The KKK came to South Carolina from out of state to protest on our State House grounds,” she said. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2016 at 6:04 PM with the headline "SC Gov. Haley to Donald Trump: ‘Bless your heart’."