Former President Donald Trump has a new challenger for the 2024 GOP nomination — Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations.
Ms Haley joined his administration in 2017, and left at the end of 2018. She’s not thought to have much of a support base within the GOP, and in most polling is only tracking in the single digits.
Mr Trump’s main rival remains Ron DeSantis, who has not yet said if he will run for president in 2024. Mr DeSantis has led the former president in some head-to-head polling.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s ex-vice president appears to be launching another bid to prove his loyalty to his former boss and his base of support in the GOP. Axios reports that he plans to fight a subpoena from Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating the effort to overturn the 2020 election at the Justice Department.
And a new piece on the inner deliberations of Trumpworld from Rolling Stone reveals that Donald Trump is making the death penalty — specifically, expanding its use in America — a centre point of his flagging 2024 campaign. According to several sources close to the former president who spoke with the magazine, Mr Trump is putting energy behind the idea of widely expanding the death penalty to make drug offences eligible for capital punishment.
The former president is said by aides to also be discussing the possibility of launching a political effort to reintroduce firing squads to the US justice system, apparently due to their flashy nature.
