Donald Trump has lashed out at Republican rival Ron DeSantis - describing him as an “average” politician as speculation grows the two will soon face off for the party’s presidential nomination.
Mr Trump, reeling from a midterm where candidates closely associated to him performed poorly, has attempted to belittle the Florida governor who is widely expected to run for president in 2024.
Mr DeSantis, 44, was re-elected as Florida governor with almost 60% of the vote, marking him out as a rising star.
But Mr Trump, who has strongly suggested he will run for the White House for a third time described him as “Ron DeSanctimonious”, a politician who had been “in desperate shape” when running for his first term in 2017.
Mr Trump said: “He was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam, who was loaded up with cash and great poll numbers.
“Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would endorse him, he could win.
“When I endorsed him, it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off.”
“I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart,” Mr Trump added, before praising himself for preventing Mr DeSantis’s election from “being stolen”.
Mr Trump maintains, despite no evidence, the 2020 election that he lost resoundingly to Joe Biden was rigged.
Voters in the midterms by and large rejected candidates who backed Mr Trump’s claims.
The full midterm results are not in but Republicans did not do as well as predicted in many parts of the country, although the House of Representatives is still likely to flip to them.
