"We have a lot, they’re all very well-named," he said. "But almost all of them said if I run, they’ll never run."

Trump has flirted openly with the idea of running for president in 2024, continuing to hold campaign-style rallies and sending out fundraising emails. Even after losing his reelection bid last year and inciting a deadly riot at the Capitol where his supporters sought to overturn the presidential election's results, the former president remains the center of gravity for Republican politics nationwide and wields immense influence within the party. Of the small handful of GOP lawmakers to publicly break with Trump, several have faced significant blowback from within the party.

As for a potential running mate for a 2024 campaign, Trump said "there are a lot of great people in the Republican Party." He called DeSantis "a good man" but added that "we have a lot of great people." The former president said Haley "every once in a while goes off the rails" — an apparent reference to her occasional willingness to criticize her former boss on issues like the Jan. 6 insurrection and the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. But Haley, Trump said, "comes back, which is nice."

"She said she’d never run if I ran, which I think is a good sign of respect," Trump said of Haley. "I was very good to her, I thought she did a very good job at what she did with the United Nations."