There was a moment in which people thought — and many liberals feared — that Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and former United States ambassador to the United Nations, would be the post-Donald Trump face of the Republican Party as a political candidate.

She was somewhat respected, had crafted an image of competence and seemed to have more of a moral center than many Republicans now toeing the line in support of Trump. Also, she would solve, or at least challenge, two of the issues that continue to dog Republicans: racism and misogyny. She is an Indian-American woman.

But, Haley burned all that to the ground when she engaged in an astounding bit of revisionist racial history about the Confederate battle flag and its relationship to Dylann Roof, the then 21-year-old white supremacist who in 2015 gunned down nine black worshipers in the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In an interview for Glenn Beck’s podcast, Haley said:

“Here is this guy that comes out with his manifesto, holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of. We don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. There’s always the small minority that’s always going to be there, but people saw it as service and sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it.”