U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley suggested Tuesday she disagreed with President Donald Trump's response to violence in Charlottesville, Va., saying she had a "personal conversation with the president" but would "leave it at that."
In the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston church massacre of nine African Americans by a white supremacist, then-South Carolina Gov. Haley won national praise for spearheading the effort to take down the Confederate flag at the statehouse in Columbia.
Trump, however, took sharp, bipartisan criticism for initially not specifically condemning white supremacists after one was arrested for ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing a woman. He later said there were "fine people" on both sides in Virginia, bringing more heat for what critics said was moral equivocation.
CNN "New Day" host Chris Cuomo said Haley showed moral leadership in South Carolina after the Charleston massacre in "calling out hate when you saw it."
"Do you believe that the president did that when he needed to last week?" Cuomo asked.
"Well, I had a personal conversation with the president about Charlottesville, and I will leave it at that," she said. "But I will tell you that there is no room for hate in this country. I know the pain that hate can cause, and we need to isolate haters, and we need to make sure that they know there is no place for them, because our country is founded on so much more than that."