Nikki Haley says if Trump runs for president in 2024 then she won’t

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said Monday that she would not mount a bid for the White House in 2024 should former President Trump decide to run again. 

“I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it,” Haley told The Associated Press at a press conference. “That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about at some point if that decision is something that has to be made.”

Haley, a former South Carolina governor considered a potential contender for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, said that she would support Trump if he makes another run for the White House.

But she also acknowledged that it had been quite some time since she spoke with the former president. Asked about the last time she talked to Trump, Haley said that it was after the 2020 presidential election but before Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to disrupt the certification of the election results.

Still, she said she had a “great working relationship” with Trump during her nearly two-year tenure as his envoy to the U.N. 

“I appreciated the way he let me do my job,” she said. “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.”

There’s still undeniable tension between Trump and Haley. In an interview with Politico in the weeks after Jan. 6, Haley delivered a scathing assessment of the former president, saying 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 that same interview, she offered a clear assessment of his political future: “He’s not going to run for federal office again.”

But nearly three months removed from the end of his first and only term in the White House, Trump has continued to privately toy with the notion of a 2024 comeback campaign, a reality that has frozen other potential GOP presidential candidates in their tracks as they wait to see what he decides.

Haley isn’t the only Trump administration alum eyeing a potential White House bid in 2024. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been making speaking rounds in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote in presidential primaries.

Other potential GOP candidates include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Rick Scott (Fla.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.). 

Haley’s remarks on Monday offered perhaps the clearest indication yet of what Trump’s possible entrance into the Republican presidential contest could mean for would-be rivals’ own political prospects. He remains the most influential figure in the modern GOP, and competing with him in a primary contest is seen by many Republicans as a risky undertaking.