Donald Trump launched into a surprise direct attack on Florida governor Ron DeSantis – a likely rival for the 2024 Republican Party nomination should the two men announce their competing candidacies as anticipated – while campaigning for the GOP’s Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania on Saturday night.
“We’re winning big, big, big in the Republican Party for the nomination like nobody’s ever seen before. There it is, Trump at 71, Ron DeSanctimonious at 10 per cent,” Mr Trump told a rally crowd in Latrobe, pointing to poll numbers on a big screen as he coined a new nickname for a man many view as his likeliest successor.
However, Mr Trump was quick to tone down his mockery the following Sunday, perhaps in response to outrage from several prominent conservative pundits, when he told another rally back in Florida (where he himself resides): “You’re going to re-elect the wonderful Marco Rubio to the United States Senate and you’re going to re-elect Ron DeSantis as your governor.”
The 45th president has a knack for inventing wrestling-style put-downs and crude nicknames for his many opponents and antagonists.
He once derided the “wonderful” Mr Rubio as “Liddle Marco”, filing him below the likes of “Sleepy Joe” Biden, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz in his little black book of enemies.
The one-termer has had plenty more to say about the pretender to his Maga throne, whom no less an authority than Mr Biden himself recently labelled “Donald Trump incarnate” during a campaign speech on behalf of his Democratic gubernatorial challenger Charlie Crist.
Mr Trump actually endorsed Mr DeSantis when he won the Sunshine State’s November 2018 gubernatorial race against Andrew Gillum, hailing him at the time as a “good friend” and a “tough cookie”.
However, their relationship has since soured in tandem with the Florida governor’s stock rising among the Maga Republican movement.
Mr Trump first sought to take credit for Mr DeSantis’s success in April 2021 when he told Maria Baritromo on Fox Business: “I endorsed Ron, and after I endorsed him, he took off like a rocketship.”
But as the Florida governor’s potential to outpace the one-term president began to become clear in opinion polls this summer, Mr Trump began to walk back his full-throated support.
In June, the University of New Hampshire shared the results of a survey that showed a shocking change of fortune for Mr Trump who, for the first time, began to trail Mr DeSantis among likely primary voters in the state.
On the same day those results were shared, he took to his own social media platform – Truth Social – to post the results of a separate poll from the right-leaning pollster Zogby, which indicated the opposite: that he was the clear favourite to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, 42 points ahead of his rival in a survey of GOP voters nationally.
Asked about whether he expected the governor to run for the presidency during an interview with Newsmax that month, Mr Trump answered: “Well, 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.”
When The New Yorker posed the same question to him in the same week, he answered: “I don’t know if Ron is running, and I don’t ask him. It’s his prerogative. I think I would win.”
He continued to watch the polls and even took to Truth Social to hit out at Fox’s morning show Fox & Friends, once his favourite programme and a regular call-in target, to berate them for citing polls favourable to Mr DeSantis, complaining the show had “gone to the dark side”.
That was followed in September by advanced notice that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman’s new book on Mr Trump, Confidence Man, contained the line that its subject considered Mr DeSantis “fat,” “phoney,” and “whiny” and was jealous of his success in following the Trump playbook on election denial to boost his own profile while managing not to get entangled in federal investigations, as he, the tactic’s originator, had done.
The contempt was clearly mutual by this point, with a burgeoning Cold War in development.
Vanity Fair duly reported the same month that Mr DeSantis privately considers the former president “a TV personality and a moron who has no business running for president”, quoting insiders close to the governor.
“DeSantis says the only way to beat Trump is to attack him head-on,” one GOP source told the magazine in the same piece, trailing a future head-to-head battle between the two.
“He says he would turn to Trump during a debate and say, ‘Why didn’t you fire [Dr Anthony] Fauci? You said you would build the wall, but there is no wall. Why is that?’”
Also in September, Mr Trump raged – this time according to Rolling Stone, citing unnamed aides – that Mr DeSantis’s political stunt of having asylum seekers flown out of Florida at taxpayers’ expense and dumped in Martha’s Vineyard to provoke Democrats and steal the headlines was “his idea”.
Then, on 27 October, Mr Trump gleefully shared comments made by former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly comparing his 2024 prospects favourably with those of his new nemesis on Truth Social.
“I think Trump sucks up all the energy in every room no matter what,” Ms Kelly had told The Rubin Report podcast.
“And even someone as skilled as a politician and smart policy-wise as DeSantis can’t overcome that. You really think the hardcore Maga is gonna abandon Trump for DeSantis? They’re not.
“They like DeSantis, but they don’t think it’s his turn. They think Trump was screwed out of his last election, that he was screwed out of his first term by all the craziness and the Russiagate and so on… They like DeSantis, but they would never cross Trump for him. And they think that DeSantis owes his political career to Trump.”
Clearly delighted, Mr Trump reposted her remarks with the comment: “I agree!”
So where will all this end?
During a podcast interview with Mr Trump’s estranged niece, psychologist Mary Trump, New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarian leaders, suggested the ex-president would seek to “take revenge” on his would-be usurper.
“He must be particularly upset with Mr Ron DeSantis who has learned all of his lessons as the most ruthless of the bunch,” Professor Ben-Ghiat said.
“He’s flourishing and Trump’s in limbo, which increases the odds that he has to run for office, because he’s got to get back in, shut everything down, take revenge. This is how strongmen are.”
To borrow the celebrated tagline from Alien vs Predator (2004): “Whoever wins… we lose.”
