If Nikki Haley can’t handle Democratic gotchas, how will she survive a presidential debate?

The Civil War was fought because the Southern states wanted to preserve the institution of slavery and their governments feared that the federal government, under Abraham Lincoln, would end slavery.

That’s not the only true answer to the question, “What caused the Civil War?” but it’s a pretty concise and thorough answer. Whatever your preferred account of the causes of the Civil War, the word “slavery” ought to be central to the explanation.

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Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley somehow failed to mention slavery in her nonanswer to that question on Wednesday. This not only suggests ignorance about U.S. history, but, in these days, it also suggests a cowardice — a fear of offending Southerners who may be defensive about the Confederacy.

Haley woke up Thursdayy and knew her answer was bad, and so she tried to fix the problem, which is fine. But her defense and cleanup effort included a lame excuse.

Maybe she’s right! Maybe the local Democratic Party sent someone to her event to ask her a kind-of-irrelevant gotcha question. But that doesn’t matter.

First off, the question should be easy to answer, and a good politician should be able to answer it in a way that segues into some more pertinent matter. (For instance, I can think of a case in our current politics in which the same Democratic Party denies the humanity of an entire class of people and, at the state level, codifies this subhuman status into law.)

Republican primary voters assessing potential nominees might be discouraged by her inability to answer a simple question.

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More importantly, the news media is largely one big Democratic plant asking gotcha questions! That’s what being a Republican presidential candidate is: answering bad-faith, often irrelevant questions crafted by liberals trying to trip you up.

Presidential debates involve the Democratic nominee effectively conspiring with the moderator to tilt the facts and ask questions in the most slanted way possible. If you can’t handle trick questions from Democrats, you can’t handle being a national-level GOP politician.