After a shaky start to his campaign, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis remains former President Donald Trump’s main challenger for the Republican nomination.
During his own tenure in the White House in 2018, Mr Trump loudly cheered Mr DeSantis’s bid for the governor’s mansion, throwing his weight behind the former congressman and appearing at rallies to stump for him, playing an important role in the candidate’s narrow defeat of Democratic rival and Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum.
Since then, however, a great deal of water has passed beneath the bridge and the two men are now increasingly antagonistic towards one another.
Mr Trump has been busy yelling a steady stream of insults and barbed nicknames across the state from Mar-a-Lago, the majority of which Mr DeSantis has wisely allowed to pass without public comment.
Here is a timeline of their disintegrating relationship.
17 November 2018
Ron DeSantis is elected governor of Florida, defeating Democrat Andrew Gillum.
Then-president Donald Trump, who had campaigned for Mr DeSantis in person and on Twitter, loudly celebrates his victory as the latest demonstration of his own power and influence.
11 March 2020
After a relatively quiet first year in the governor’s mansion, Mr DeSantis faces a major crisis when the US Centers for Disease Control announces that Covid-19 is spreading in his state. Within days, the entire world is going into lockdown to control the spread of the contagious respiratory disease.
While Mr Trump bungles the federal response to the crisis, making empty promises as to when society can reopen, openly speculating that injecting bleach might provide a cure and eventually contracting the coronavirus himself one month before Election Day, Mr DeSantis recognises opposition to masks and social restrictions as a culture war flashpoint and uses the mood to his political advantage.
“We’re not shutting down, we’re gonna go forward, we’re gonna continue to protect the most vulnerable,” he said in a speech in June. “Particularly when you have a virus that disproportionately impacts one segment of society, to suppress a lot of working-age people at this point I don’t think would likely be very effective.”
20 January 2021
Joe Biden succeeds Mr Trump as president, the latter leaving Washington two weeks after his two-month campaign to prove the false contention that the 2020 presidential election was rigged had ended with the Capitol riot in which his misled supporters laid siege to the legislative complex baying for blood and threatening to lynch vice president Mike Pence and kidnap House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Disgraced, discredited, twice-impeached and banned from social media, Mr Trump slinks off back to his Palm Beach estate, while the same state’s governor continues to make a name for himself, capitalising on his pandemic popularity among Republicans by eventually taking on LGBT+ rights and the might of the Walt Disney Corporation, cheered on by a movement looking for a less contaminated and compromised alternative to Mr Trump, who can only look on with envy.
29 April 2021
Mr Trump tells Maria Baritromo on Fox Business Network: “He’s a friend of mine. I endorsed Ron, and after I endorsed him, he took off like a rocket ship.”
On the suggestion that Mr DeSantis might make a good successor to Mr Pence as a running mate, Mr Trump answers: “A lot of people like that – you know, I’m just saying what I read and what you read – they love that ticket. But certainly, Ron would be considered. He’s a great guy.”
4 October 2021
Addressing the prospect of having to square up against Mr DeSantis in a future election race, rather than their joining forces, Mr Trump tells Yahoo! Finance he would beat the governor with ease.
“I don’t think I will face him. I think most people would drop out, I think he would drop out,” he says. “If I faced him, I’d beat him like I would beat everyone else. If I do run, I think that I’ll do extremely well.”
For his part, Mr DeSantis tells Fox News: “I’m not considering anything beyond doing my job. We got a lot of stuff going on in Florida.”
21 June 2022
Increasingly bothered by Mr DeSantis’ rise, Mr Trump begins to insist that the former owes his success entirely to his support.
On the prospect of the governor running for the White House, as discussed at length in The New Yorker, its former occupant tells Newsmax: “I don’t know that he wants to run, you know, I have a good relationship with Ron. But I was very responsible for him getting elected, as you know… We’ll see what happens.”
14 September 2022
Mr DeSantis engages in a distinctly Trumpian stunt by sending approximately 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers by air from San Antonio, Texas, to Crestview airport in Florida and then on to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, a Democratic stronghold.
A piece of provocative political theatre, Mr Trump gripes that he thought of it first.
24 September 2022
While that episode brought liberal condemnation, including from President Biden, who called it “inhumane”, Mr DeSantis wins praise soon after by declaring a state of emergency when Hurricane Ian strikes his state.
He would later be praised for his swift and decisive response to the natural disaster.
8 November 2022
The two men hold competing rallies in Florida in the final days before the midterm elections, with Mr Trump debuting his prized “Ron DeSanctimonious” nickname at his event.
But the governor goes on to win re-election in commanding fashion, beating Democrat Charlie Crist by a nearly 20-point margin and drawing in previously untapped support from Latinos and suburban voters.
By contrast, Mr Trump’s preferred candidates lose races across the country from Pennsylvania to Arizona as the widely predicted “red wave” fails to materialise, causing the GOP to miss out on the Senate and only narrowly win a majority in the House of Representatives and prompting many to question the former president’s continued stranglehold over their party and begin to look elsewhere for alternative leadership.
11 November 2022
The fallout from the midterms really sets the rivalry simmering, with Mr Trump resorting to suggesting he had deployed the FBI to secure Mr DeSantis’ win over Mr Gillum in 2018.
Taking to Truth Social, Mr Trump calls his rival an “average Republican governor with great public relations” who was “politically dead” until he helped turn his fortunes around.
He writes: “I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the US attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…”
The post, inevitably, invites calls for the matter to be investigated urgently.
16 November 2022
Mr Trump announces his intention to run again for the US presidency in a low-key televised address from Mar-a-Lago that many feel lacks the energy of his earlier political speeches.
Doubts remain over whether the myriad civil and criminal investigations into his affairs could yet derail him.
29 January 2023
Continuing to obsessively re-litigate Mr DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial win in order to bolster his own role in it, Mr Trump accuses his rival of “trying to rewrite history” over his record in responding to Covid, claiming he had “changed his tune a lot” on the introduction of vaccine mandates.
Speaking to reporters while campaigning in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Mr Trump gripes: “Ron would have not been governor if it wasn’t for me. When I hear that he might [run] I think it’s very disloyal… There are Republican governors that did not close their states. They’re trying to rewrite history.”
8 February 2023
Clearly preparing to get nasty, Mr Trump resorts to amplifying an unfounded smear about Mr DeSantis on Truth Social relating to his short-lived career as a high school teacher in Georgia as a younger man.
18 February 2023
A new nickname, “Meatball Ron”, is reported to have been trialled by Mr Trump, still seeking a way to trash-talk his likely opponent, as he had done so many times before, but this time he unexpectedly denies it is his coinage.
“I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will,” he raves on Truth Social.
“Even though FoxNews-killing lightweight Paul Ryan is revered by him, Low Energy Jeb Bush is his hero and always at his side, his beaches and State were closed for long periods of time, his testing, testing, testing for the China Virus didn’t work out too well, and his loyalty skills are really weak, it would be totally inappropriate to use the word ‘meatball’ as a moniker for Ron!”
8 March 2023
Another new nickname, “Tiny D”, is reported by Bloomberg as being workshopped by Mr Trump, this time either a lewd reference to the governor’s manhood or an allegation that he had been spotted wearing heeled cowboy boots in order to increase his height.
30 April 2023
Responding to Mr DeSantis setting out on a global tour, visiting the UK and Japan in the interest of looking statesmanlike on the world stage, Mr Trump tries a new attack line, saying he “couldn’t care less” if the governor runs against him.
“I couldn’t care less if Ron DeSanctus [sic] runs, but the problem is the Bill he is about to sign, which allows him to run without resigning from being Governor, totally weakens Election Integrity in Florida,” he posted.
16 May 2023
Still searching for that killer attack line, Mr Trump tells The Messenger his political opponent is a “rank amateur”.
“I think the media has said he’s doing a terrible job and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You know, the media has not been friendly to him. They’re saying that he’s a rank amateur. And you know, he started off fine, but then he hasn’t done very well. You look at the polls.”
Returning to the disloyalty argument, Mr Trump manages so sound genuinely wounded as he complains: “He’s very disloyal. He was a dead man walking. He was dead, dead as a doornail. And I revived him.
“I’m a loyal person. If that happened to me, I would never run against the guy that did that. He’s got plenty of years left. And I think if he runs, he’s gonna lose MAGA votes forever. That’s my opinion. And the MAGA votes are almost everything in the Republican Party, far bigger than you think.”
Mr Trump added that it was “too early” to say if he would endorse Mr DeSantis if he won the GOP primary.
“So far, I’m not a fan of the way that he’s running. First of all, he shouldn’t be running right now because he hasn’t filed. The guy’s doing ads. He’s acting as a candidate, but he doesn’t have to play by the rules because he hasn’t filed, which is a total violation. I mean, this guy’s doing interviews as a candidate, but he hasn’t filed, which is really not appropriate.”
In the same interview, he said Florida’s new six-week abortion ban was “too harsh” and likely to alienate voters.
Unusually, Mr DeSantis did respond to that one by arguing: “Protecting an unborn child when there’s a detectable heartbeat is something that almost 99 per cent of pro-lifers support. As a Florida resident, you know, he didn’t give an answer about, ‘Would you have signed the heartbeat bill that Florida did, that had all the exceptions that people talk about?’”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung came back with: “Ron DeSantis is flailing in the polls and is closer to the bottom of the pack than he is to President Trump, who is dominating in every single poll.”
The feud continues as Mr Trump claims “Ron’s magic is GONE” after two candidates endorsed by Mr DeSantis suffer embarrassing election defeats within a week: Daniel Davis fails to become mayor of Jacksonville and Kelly Craft loses out on the Republican nomination to be the next governor of Kentucky.
24 May 2023
As Mr DeSantis finally announces his campaign, initially with a 30-second teaser video posted to Twitter by his wife Casey, Mr Trump attempts to hijack his big day by launching into an insult-packed tirade on Truth Social, again calling his rival “disloyal”, declaring that he “desperately needs a personality transplant” and calling him “disciple of horrible RINO Paul Ryan”, the acronym short for “Republican In Name Only”.
Sounding more unhinged than ever, Mr Trump thrashes out the following diatribe in full keyboard warrior mode: “Look, Rob DeSanctimonious came to me asking for help. He was losing badly, by 31 points, to popular Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.
“He was getting ready to drop out of the race – Ran a terrible campaign! Ron told me he had one last chance, my Support & Endorsement, which Putnam, and everyone else, wanted also. I gave it to Ron, and the race was over. In one day, he went from losing badly, to winning by a lot. With 3 LARGE TRUMP RALLIES, he WON THE GENERAL ELECTION in an upset. DISLOYAL!!!”
Two more feverish all-caps rants follow, with a break for lunch in between, laying into Mr DeSantis on policy and polling grounds.
