Donald Trump can’t seem to join his base with his lines of attack on Ron DeSantis — especially in Florida, the politician’s home state.
While Trump has made mocking his opponents and political rivals a signature of his campaign style, his jokes about DeSantis smashed with the audience at a local GOP dinner Friday in Lee County.
Normally, when Trump reserves his attacks on less popular Democrats or Republicans, he laughs and applauds wildly — but Florida Republicans don’t take much fun when their beloved governor is the butt of the joke.
“In Florida, you got 1.2 million more votes than your successful governor’s campaign,” Trump said during the Lincoln Reagan dinner on Friday. ‘do you know that. We got 1.2 million.
Donald Trump’s attacks on Ron DeSantis are not reaching Republicans. During a speech at a Lee County Republican event, the former president gets sporadic chuckles, at best, when he mocks Florida’s governor.
He then used his voice to mock DeSantis and play the governor asking him for help during the 2018 gubernatorial race in the Sunshine State.
Sir, I would like to have your support sir. I would love to have your support. I’m down at about three. I’d like to have your support,” Trump re-enacted before giving his imaginary response: “Well, let’s think about it.”
Then he dropped the offer and said, “Then there was the rocket ship after I gave it a go.”
“Otherwise, right now, you’d have a lawyer somewhere looking for work,” he said of DeSantis.
After Trump’s attack on DeSantis, there were a few awkward laughs in the still room, prompting him to add, “If that.”
DeSantis received his JD from Harvard Law School in 2005 after earning his BA from Yale University. He served as a JAG officer in the Navy, overlapping a few years with his time as the United States Representative for Florida before running for governor.
It was true that DeSantis trailed 2018 GOP primary rival Adam Putnam in the polls, but he received a boost in 2017 when Trump issued his endorsement for the eventual winner. He went on to defeat the Democratic nominee, Andrew Gillum, by a very narrow margin.
DeSantis’ 2022 re-election victory was a landslide against Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist. The governor has the largest margin of victory in a Florida gubernatorial election since 1982 — even turning Miami-Dade County red after it has voted blue since 2022.
DeSantis has shied away from directly responding to the attacks, but has taken some swipes at Trump’s leadership style.
DeSantis’ victory rally attendees chanted “two more years” instead of the common “four more years” to show support for a 2024 presidential run.
DeSantis has remained relatively neutral on the Trump issue.
The most impactful attack was a disguised jab, at best, when DeSantis said that “leaders take the bull by the horns and make decisions for themselves.”
“They don’t subcontract their leadership to health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci,” DeSantis said during remarks over the weekend.
He was referring to Trump’s appointment of Dr. Anthony Fauci to lead the White House’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which many Republicans feel has been a failure from the start.
DeSantis has yet to announce his candidacy for president, but he’s taken all the usual steps toward making a bid for the White House, including touring the country and stopping in key states like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
Trump has attributed DeSantis’ rise on the political stage to his endorsement in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race and says any run against him in 2024 would be ‘disloyal’
Trump quickly escalated his attacks on DeSantis after he said earlier this year during a visit to South Carolina at the start of the primary contest that it would be “disloyal” for him to bid against the man who helped him win the Florida state assembly.
Many of the former president’s attacks against DeSantis didn’t get the usual backlash he used to get when he went after his opponents.
During a rally in Waco, Texas, last month, Trump attacked DeSantis at length, but he received a noticeably lesser reaction than the usually amplified MAGA crowd.
Impersonations of Trump have long been a big hit at his rallies and are a staple of his campaign rhetoric.
He said in Waco that DeSantis came to him “with tears in his eyes” begging for an endorsement, but the lack of reaction was more evident than any raucous laughter at jeers from Democrats like Hillary Clinton and DeSantis’ former rival Andrew Gillum.
On his social media, Trump called the Florida governor “DeSanctimonious” and cited unsubstantiated allegations that he had inappropriate relationships with underage students while he was a teacher in Georgia.
