Ron DeSantis responds to Donald Trump’s recent attacks

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Former President Donald Trump took aim at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ leadership during the worst of the Covid-19 crisis during a recent campaign in New Hampshire and South Carolina. On Tuesday, Mr DeSantis recovered.

When you’re an elected executive, you have to make all kinds of decisions, Mr DeSantis said. You have to steer that ship. And the good thing is, is that the people are able to render a judgment on that if they re-elected you or not.

And I’m happy to say, you know, in my case, not only did we win re-election, we won with the highest percentage of the vote that any Republican gubernatorial candidate has had in the history of the state of Florida, he continued. We won by the largest raw vote margin of more than 1.5 million votes of any gubernatorial candidate in Florida history.

Mr Trump, who launched his third bid for the White House in November, launched several different lines of attack against his potential primary rival over the weekend.

He accused Mr DeSantis of trying to rewrite history about his handling of the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in Florida, arguing that the state had been on lockdown for longer than Mr DeSantis had led people to believe, and also told the Associated Press that a DeSantis candidacy for president would be a huge act of betrayal against him personally.

Florida and some other states like Georgia ended their Covid-related restrictions in the summer of 2020 and have relatively low vaccination rates, factors that some public health officials believe led to thousands -thousand excess deaths in those states.

Mr DeSantis has not yet announced his plans for 2024, but he is widely believed to be preparing to run for president and is the only potential candidate to lead Mr Trump in multiple polls in early voting states.

Mr. DeSantis’ popularity among Republican voters, notable for his attacks on voting rights, academic freedom, transgender Floridians, and various cultural issues that animate the right, seems to have caught Mr Trump’s attention.

The former president, who faced a range of legal issues stemming from his actions during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, is beginning to ramp up his campaign activities after scheduling relatively few events during of the holiday season.

His attacks on Mr DeSantis marked an inflection point in relations between the two far-right politicians, who were close allies when Mr DeSantis narrowly defeated Andrew Gillum in his first gubernatorial race in Florida in 2018.

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