It was one of the most volatile moments of Wednesday night's debate: Nikki Haley called Vivek Ramaswamy "scum" after he brought up her daughter. In the aftermath, neither candidate is backing down over the confrontation, which revolved around the social media platform TikTok. In an interview with Fox News Thursday, Haley said Ramaswamy was out of bounds when he pointed out that her 25-year-old daughter is on the Chinese-owned platform. "This is a serious time in our country and this is not the time that you need to have, you know, these personal hits," she said, per Mediaite.
Asked by Fox's Bill Hemmer if she had regrets about uttering the "scum" remark, Haley responded: "I mean, Bill, that was showing a lot of restraint, that's all I'll say. That was showing a lot of restraint." In a post-debate interview of his own, Ramaswamy said the issue was fair game because Haley had previously called him out for being on TikTok. "If she talks about TikTok sanctimoniously on stage without mentioning her own adult family members of the next generation are on it, we are not fixing the problem," Ramaswamy told CNN, per Politico. "The error," he added, is "somebody lecturing the rest of the country about the perils of it while failing to set an example of leadership a little closer to home."
Ramaswamy also argued that being on TikTok "is not a sin" and said the GOP should be using it, as he says he does, to "bridge a generational divide." Fellow candidate Ron DeSantis, however, agreed with Haley in regard to her daughter. "I think the kids are out of bounds," he told Fox on Thursday. "I didn't think that was an appropriate thing to do." The issue has come up in the debates over concerns that TikTok poses a national security threat because Beijing could theoretically use the platform to glean data from Americans. (More Nikki Haley 2024 stories.)
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