Trump taunts Haley about past statements on challenging him

Former President Trump on Wednesday taunted Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, about an anticipated announcement that she will be launching a 2024 White House bid.

The former South Carolina governor is expected to announce that she will be running for president later this month, becoming the second Republican to officially wade into the GOP primary and the first to challenge Trump. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he took one of his first jabs at her since the reporting of her anticipated 2024 White House campaign.

“Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor. She should definitely run!” he wrote, including an older clip of Haley saying that she would support Trump if he ran in 2024 and would not jump into the race if the former president did so.

The development comes as Trump has started ramping up his rhetoric toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — another widely floated potential presidential candidate. Trump told The Associated Press in a recent interview that if the Florida governor ran “it would be a great act of disloyalty” and claimed over the weekend that DeSantis was “trying to rewrite history” over how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Asked about the former president’s criticism of him during a Tuesday news conference, DeSantis hit back, saying, “If you take a crisis situation like COVID, the good thing about it is when you’re an elected executive, you have to make all kinds of decisions. You got to steer that ship and the good thing is, is that the people are able to render a judgment on that, whether they reelect you or not.”

“And I’m happy to say in my case, not only did we win reelection, we won with the highest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate has in the history of the state of Florida,” he added.

The Hill has reached out to a Haley spokesperson for comment.