Donald Trump will host a rally in his new chosen home state of Florida just two days before Election Day, and a key absence is already raising eyebrows in the GOP and national press.
Typically, when a former president holds a campaign rally in an election year, their attendance is the big story of the day. But when Donald Trump’s Save America PAC announced his plans to host the rally in the backyard of rising GOP star Ron DeSantis without the governor in attendance, the potential snub became the headline.
The two men are the Republican Party’s undisputed top prospects for the 2024 presidential nomination. Mr Trump has hinted that he will mount a bid to retake the White House since nearly the day he left office in January 2021; Mr DeSantis, meanwhile, has remained consitent over the past two years as the only Republican to even look competitive against Mr Trump in polling of a hypothetical GOP primary matchup; other potential contenders, like Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence have struggled to even register in the high single digits in such a matchup.
Mr Trump will rally at the Miami-Dade County Fair, joined by Sen Marco Rubio, who leads his Democratic opponent in a close race for reelection. It’s seemingly the perfect venue for his long-expected announcement of a 2024 bid; many news reports have indicated that GOP leaders are pushing the ex-president to save his endorsement for after the midterms conclude, while his most loyal supporters in right-wing media have called on him to do so sooner.
The rally will precede another potential 2024 launchpoint venue visit by the ex-president on Monday, when he will fly to Ohio and rally one last time with Senate candidate JD Vance.
The announcement of the Florida rally Wednesday evening quickly caught the eye of many reporters who noticed Mr DeSantis’s absence from the guest list. Representatives for the Florida governor responded with a wave of anonymous complaints in Politico, claiming that Mr DeSantis’s team had not been told about the rally at all.
“You’ve got the Sunday before Election Day totally hijacked by Trump parachuting in on Trump Force One taking up the whole day,” one source Politico described as a “longtime Republican consultant who is close to the governor” grumbled. “No Republican could go to a DeSantis event that day. None. And DeSantis won’t be here? This is big.”
The Trump team predictably denied any conflict between the governor and the ex-president, explaining that the rally two days before Election Day was “part of a series of stops he is making for Republican Senate candidates” and came as the result of a conversation between Mr Rubio and Mr Trump. But at recent Trump rallies other candidates for office have made appearances as well, such as just earlier this month when Mr Trump rallied alongside gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona.
His closest allies, meanwhile, appeared to not have gotten the memo.
Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidante and Richard Nixon “dirty tricks” operative, seethed at a DeSantis supporter on Telegram, writing that the governor should show more loyalty to the former president who has often taken credit for DeSantis’s election.
Notably not among the last-minute swing of Senate candidates holding rallies with Mr Trump was Herschel Walker, the deeply-embattled Republican running to unseat Sen Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
On Wednesday, attorney Gloria Allred came forward with a second woman who has provided evidence to support a claim that Mr Walker, a staunchly anti-abortion candidate, in fact drove her and paid for her to get an abortion in 1993 that she did not want.
