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Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is nearly three months old, but already it’s clear whom he sees as his biggest threat with the Iowa caucuses still a year away: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The perspective comes as Trump continues to act more like an underdog in the race for the Republican nomination. In recent days, the former president has gone after DeSantis, with Trump somehow claiming that Florida “was closed for a long period of time” after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020.
“They’re trying to rewrite history,” he added of DeSantis in an interview earlier this week.
It’s an odd front for Trump to open given that he praised DeSantis’s re-opening approach three years ago. Not surprisingly, the 45th president also failed to mention that he advocated lockdowns in the spring of 2020.
Press accounts at the time showed Florida as one of the first high-population states to open back up in May 2020, which drew heavy criticism from the press and Democratic lawmakers at the time.
Trump’s farcical charge about DeSantis has fallen flat, in part because DeSantis and his communications team are refusing to take Trump’s bait when asked for comment by either declining to comment altogether or responding by touting their own record.
So, after Trump’s COVID/lockdown allegations barely created a ripple on social and traditional media, Trump turned up the volume by pointing to his 2018 endorsement of DeSantis, which he apparently believes precludes the governor from ever running against him.
“He was dead, he was leaving the race, he came over and he begged me, begged me, for an endorsement,” Trump told Hugh Hewitt on his radio show on Friday. “He was getting ready to drop out.
