Former President Donald Trump took credit for Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s success in Florida and said he’ll “handle” the twice-elected governor if he mounts a 2024 presidential run against him.
In an interview this week, Trump said he alone is responsible for getting DeSantis elected in 2018 and that he only backed DeSantis because he didn’t know the other Republican in the race. Though DeSantis hasn’t launched a presidential bid, he’s a favorite possible primary challenger for Trump.
DESANTIS FACES EARLY CRITICISM FROM POSSIBLE 2024 OPPONENTS
“I got him elected, pure and simple,” Trump told the conservative podcast Water Cooler on Monday, adding, “I felt I might as well endorse him because I didn’t know Adam Putnam. But [DeSantis] was at 3[%], he was ready to drop out of the race, it was all done. Adam Putnam had the Republican nomination locked up, the nomination for governor of Florida, he had it locked up.”
Trump continued that when he first met Putnam a year later, who was Florida’s agriculture commissioner at the time, he told Trump that his endorsement of DeSantis was like “a nuclear bomb” exploding in the race.
“Ron was going to drop out of the race, and he asked me if I’d endorse him, and I did endorse him. … Instead of dropping out of the race, he went to the head of the race by a lot,” Trump said.
“Now, I hear he might want to run against me, so we’ll handle that the way I handle things,” he concluded.
Trump also touched on some prominent evangelical leaders declining to throw their support to him this early in the 2024 cycle, calling them “disloyal.”
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“I don’t really care. That’s a sign of disloyalty. There’s great disloyalty in the world of politics,” he said, adding that he’s the “most pro-life president” and that those against abortion “could have fought much harder” in the midterm elections.
Some polls are showing DeSantis with the potential to beat both Trump in a primary and President Joe Biden in the general election. A recent survey projected DeSantis would beat Biden in a head-to-head matchup 45%-42% and Trump 49%-41%.
