Haley to Ramaswamy during heated GOP debate exchange: ‘You’re just scum’

In a particularly heated moment at Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley responded angrily to an attack by Vivek Ramaswamy, calling him “scum” for bringing up her family.

During a section on the topic of whether the United States should restrict access to the social media app TikTok, which is owned by the China-based company ByteDance, Ramaswamy went after Haley.

“I want to laugh about why Nikki Haley didn’t answer your question, which is about looking at families in the eye. At the last debate she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first.”

“Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Haley shot back Ramaswamy, and the crowd showered him with boos as he continued speaking.

“You’re just scum,” she then added of Ramaswamy, with whom she has repeatedly clashed at the previous GOP debates.

Ramaswamy was the first candidate at Wednesday’s debate to single out his opponents, launching frequent broadsides against Haley and DeSantis.

Continuing his criticism of Haley on the subject of TikTok, Ramaswamy said “this is the problem when you have Republicans that temporarily go the way the winds blow and now it’s popular to talk tough on China.”

After the debate moved on to other issues and broke for commercial, a television advertisement for Tik-Tok was shown in many U.S. markets.