Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went after former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on a local South Carolina radio show on Tuesday and questioned her ‘leadership’ based on a tweet following the death of George Floyd in 2020.

‘I remember when the George Floyd riots were happening, I called out the National Guard,’ DeSantis told WORD 106.9’s Tara Show in South Carolina on Tuesday. 

‘I said I’m standing with police, she was tweeting that it needed to be personal and painful for every single person. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why does that need to be personal and painful for you or me? We had nothing to do with it.’’

‘It just shows an example of her adopting this left-wing mindset and accepting the narrative. We need leaders who are going to fight the narrative. We need leaders who are going to fight back against the left and beat the left, and I’m the only one running that has a firm track record of defeating the Democrats and defeating the left on all these issues.’

DeSantis was referring to a tweet from Haley in May 2020 where she wrote, ‘It’s important to understand that the death of George Floyd was personal and painful for many. In order to heal, it needs to be personal and painful for everyone.’

DeSantis and radio host Tara Servatius also criticized Haley on transgender bathroom bills, with the Florida governor saying that Haley ‘killed legislation to protect girls and bragged about it.’

‘There he goes again,’ a spokesperson for the Haley campaign told Fox News Digital. ‘Ron DeSantis is so desperate to revive his flailing campaign, he can’t be bothered with the facts. Nikki Haley has always supported separate bathrooms for biological boys and girls. Ron DeSantis had the exact same position as Haley in a 2018 interview, but now, Ron DeSantis is lying because he’s losing.’ 

The Haley campaign was referring to a 2018 clip where DeSantis was asked as a gubernatorial candidate if he would ‘pass a bill’ that allows transgender people to ‘pick the bathrooms they choose’ and DeSantis said, ‘I would leave it as it is and stay out of that.’

Since taking office, DeSantis has signed several pieces of transgender-related legislation in Florida, including bills that ban gender reassignment surgery for minors, bans pronoun use in schools and prohibiting ‘willfully entering restroom or changing facility designated for opposite sex.’ 

China has conducted a jaw-dropping 180 intercepts against U.S. aircraft since the fall of 2021, according to the recently released Pentagon’s 2023 annual report on Chinese military power. 

To protect the lives of U.S. service personnel and reaffirm their right to operate in international airspace, President Biden must confront President Xi on this issue during their tête-à-tête Wednesday on the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in San Fransisco. 

These incidents are not isolated high jinks by maverick Chinese pilots. Far from it. The People’s Liberation Army operates under the tight leash of the Chinese Communist Party. This behavior is part of a larger political-military effort to intimidate the United States and its allies from operating in the Western Pacific.

China’s aerial intercepts are notable not just for their frequency, but also their hair-raising nature. Late last month, a Chinese jet fighter buzzed within 10 feet of one of our B-52 bombers flying in international airspace over the South China Seas. 

That is less than a car length from a midair collision, in pitch darkness no less. In response, Indo-Pacific Command issued a statement, noting the ‘unsafe and unprofessional’ nature of the Chinese pilot.

If trespassers somehow managed to get that close to a B-52 parked on the tarmac, Air Force Security Forces would riddle them with lead. Yet when a supersonic Chinese jet screams within 10 feet of one of our lumbering bombers in international airspace, our military brass issues the PLA a polite scolding.

This is not the first time the Pentagon has publicly raised the issue of unsafe Chinese aerial behavior. On June 2, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin gave a major speech in Singapore, noting that China ‘continues to conduct an alarming number of risky intercepts of U.S. and allied aircraft flying lawfully in international airspace.’ 

China’s bad behavior continues, so the secretary’s point evidently fell upon deaf ears. PLA buzzing continues against not only the United States, but its close allies as well. Two weeks ago, Chinese fighters fired flares right in the path of a Canadian helicopter operating in the South China Sea, forcing it to take evasive action.

The close encounters continue not only in the air, but also at sea. 

Just last week, Chinese Coast Guard ships fired water cannons at Philippine Coast Guard vessels in the Spratley Islands, the latest of many coercive activities aimed at Manila. In fact, all this bullying continues even though China signed a detailed agreement with the U.S., way back in 2014, to avoid unsafe intercepts in the air and at sea. 

China’s high-altitude antics are dangerous on several levels. 

For starters, the intercepts put American and allied lives at risk. More broadly, they reinforce the image of weakness, feeding the narrative that President Biden is unwilling to protect American military personnel in harm’s way, whether they are flying routine missions over the Western Pacific or bunkered on Middle East bases. 

This behavior also raises the odds of a midair collision involving U.S. and Chinese aircraft. This would spark a crisis in the blink of an eye, as happened in 2001, just four months into George W. Bush’s young presidency. 

A Chinese J-8 fighter slammed into an EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace, which forced the American plane to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island. China then detained 24 of our crew members for 11 days, releasing them only after the Bush administration issued a quasi-apology.

The stakes are higher now. China is much stronger militarily than it was in 2001, and the United States is currently straining to fund two wars overseas. 

In October, the Pentagon released a lengthy scroll of photos and videos documenting dangerous Chinese intercepts. Shining the spotlight on bullying behavior is always a good step, but it is not enough. Biden must raise this issue with Xi in San Francisco.

If sweet reason and stern words fail to sway, the Biden administration should authorize F-35 fighter escorts of its unarmed reconnaissance planes until China gets the message – and backs off. 

President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to sit for a highly anticipated meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in the Bay Area on Wednesday — a meeting that officials hope will ease tensions in the midst of wars raging in Israel and Ukraine.

The meeting is to take place in San Francisco and will be a setting for ‘intense diplomacy,’ a senior administration official said.

The White House says Biden and Xi are expected to discuss the relationship between the United States and China, including the importance of maintaining ‘open lines of communication.’

A senior administration official said the two leaders will also discuss ‘managing competition responsibly’ along with a range of regional, global and transnational issues, including Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, and the growing conflicts in the Middle East.

‘There will be a conversation on North Korea about some of our concerns with respect to the relationship with Russia in Ukraine,’ a senior official said. ‘I think with respect to the Middle East, I believe that the president will underscore our desire for China to make clear in its burgeoning relationship with Iran that it is essential that Iran not seek to escalate or spread violence in the Middle East, and to warn, quite clearly, that if Iran undertakes provocative actions anywhere, that the United States is prepared to respond and respond promptly.’

The two are also expected to discuss additional ‘potentially contentious’ topics, including election interference, with Biden planning to warn Xi about potential election influence operations.

The meeting this week will be the second in-person meeting between Biden and Xi since the beginning of the Biden administration in January 2021, but it will be the ‘seventh interaction,’ the official said.

Biden and Xi last met in November 2022 on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, where they agreed that more direct communication between U.S. and Chinese leadership was desirable.

‘Both leaders have a longstanding relationship that began when they were both vice presidents,’ the official said. ‘They have known each other for roughly a dozen years.’

Officials said that in the last eight months the Biden administration has been working to ‘restore diplomatic interaction.’ In that time, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with Chinese Director Wang Yi three times; Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo have traveled to Beijing; and China has sent its vice president, foreign minister and other senior officials to the United States for meetings.

‘Over the last nearly three years, the administration surveyed the strategic landscape, assessed the challenge and took a series of purposeful strategic steps both at home and abroad in a diplomatic context that we think is sustaining,’ the official said.

But the meeting between Biden and Xi on Wednesday comes at a critical time, one that Biden administration officials say is ripe for ‘high-level diplomacy.’

The Biden administration says its approach is ‘steady and consistent.’

‘We’re not stepping back from our interests and values. We’re moving forward on them,’ a senior official said while noting that they are ‘clear-eyed about this.’

‘We also believe that intense competition requires and demands intense diplomacy to manage tensions and to prevent competition from verging into conflict or confrontation,’ an official said. ‘We expect China to be around and to be a major player on the world stage for the rest of our lifetimes.’

Biden administration senior officials say that the meeting keeps in line with the United States’ ‘decades of experience’ in talking to and ‘working with competitors when our interests call for it.’

‘And this meeting with President Xi is in keeping with that tradition in American statecraft,’ an official said. ‘And at this meeting, I think you can expect us to draw on that experience as we both stabilize the relationship and deliver in material, tangible ways for the American people.’

The goal of the meeting, an official said, is not to return with ‘deliverables’ but rather to ensure the administration is ‘managing the competition, preventing the downside risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open.’

One critical line of discussion, officials said, will be about open lines of communication between U.S. and Chinese military channels — especially in light of the Chinese surveillance balloon that traversed the continental United States in February.

‘This is absolutely critical. And when we’re talking about managing risks, about avoiding conflict, this is exactly the sort of communication we need to be having, both at senior levels of our two militaries but also operator to operator,’ the official said. ‘The balloon comes up often in the context of the need for communications between our two sides. And I think the balloon episode underscored the difficulty we had at the time to be able to establish high-level, consequential communications with Beijing.’

‘We’ve made that case persistently and consistently,’ the official continued. ‘I think you can expect the president to raise the broad parameters of ‘mil to mil’ engagement with President Xi next week.’

The official said that Biden and administration officials have raised the issue in ‘every encounter.’

‘I think it is fair to say that the Chinese have been reluctant. And so the president is going to press assertively next week,’ the official said.