Nikki Haley says she 'would not run' for President in 2024 if Donald Trump does

Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on April 12 said that she would not mount a bid for the White House in 2024 if former President Donald Trump decides to run again. “I would not run if President Trump ran,” Haley told The Associated Press at a press conference. She also said that she would support Trump if he makes another run for the White House.  

Haley, who is a former South Carolina governor and is considered a potential contender for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, said, “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it. That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about at some point if that decision is something that has to be made”. 

Haley even acknowledged that it had been quite some time since she spoke with the former president. When asked about the last time she talked to Trump, she said that it was after the 2020 presidential election but before January 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to disrupt the certification of the election result. Still, Haley said that she had a “great working relationship” with Trump during her nearly two-year tenure as his envoy to the UN. 

She said, “I appreciated the way he let me do my job. I thought we did some fantastically great foreign policy things together and look, I just want to keep building on what we accomplished and not watch it get torn down”. 

Tensions between Trump and Haley 

There is still undeniable tension between the two. Haley has rebuked Trump over his false claims that the November 3 election had been stolen and for his fiery speech on January 6 that inspired some of his supporters to march on the US Capitol to stop the counting of Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden. In an interview with Politico, in the weeks after Jan 6, she had also delivered a scathing assessment of the former President and said that it had been a mistake for Republicans to listen to him and predicting that he would find himself “further and further isolated” in the coming months and years. 

In the same interview, Haley had also offered a clear assessment of his political future and said, “He (Trump) is not going to run for federal office again”. However, nearly three months after ending his presidential term, Trump has continued to privately toy with the notion of a 2024 comeback campaign. He has also suggested that he will make a decision after the 2022 midterm elections that will determine which party controls the House and Senate. 

(With inputs from AP)