Trump says he appointed Haley to UN post so McMaster could become South Carolina governor

Former President Donald Trump said his appointment of Nikki Haley as ambassador to the United Nations was only a favor to the Palmetto State.

Hours after Haley’s campaign kickoff, when she called for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old, Trump took jabs at the former South Carolina governor on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump, who is 76, said the reason he appointed Haley to be ambassador to the U.N. was to elevate Gov. Henry McMaster to his current position, “where he has done an absolutely fantastic job.”

“That was a big reason why I appointed Nikki to the position — it was a favor to the people I love in South Carolina,” Trump posted.

McMaster, the state’s lieutenant governor at the time, was the first statewide elected official in the U.S. to endorse Trump in the 2016 race. After Haley took the U.N. job, McMaster ascended to the governor’s office, a job he ran for against Haley in 2010.

Now that Haley is officially in the race for the White House, jabs between her and Trump may intensify.

Before Trump’s visit to South Carolina in January, he and Haley had a phone call about her candidacy.

Trump in an interview with WIS TV last month said Haley didn’t indicate whether she would run. He added that she wanted his opinion.

After her campaign kickoff, Haley addressed the call and said she never asked Trump whether she should run, but called to let him know she would join the race.

Her entrance into the race also comes after Republicans only gained a small majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, when candidates endorsed by Trump in high-profile races did not perform as well as he had hoped.

“I didn’t ask, I told (him) that I thought that we needed to go in a new direction,” Haley said during an interview with NBC’s the Today Show.. “But when I first said I wouldn’t run against him, Afghanistan hadn’t fallen. We didn’t see the rise in inflation like we’ve seen. We didn’t see what was happening in our schools and we didn’t see the results of the midterms that we just had. It is time for a new generation of leaders.”