Don’t believe ‘disloyal’ Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump tells voters

Donald Trump has lambasted his closest challenger for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, saying it would be ‘very disloyal’ of Ron DeSantis to run against him.

Former US President Donald Trump speaks at a 2024 election campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump has lambasted his closest challenger for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, saying it would be “very disloyal” of Ron DeSantis to run against him.

Trump, 76, was speaking as he flew to the first campaign stops in his effort to retake the White House next year.

He did not mention DeSantis, 44, during a speech in South Carolina, but aboard Trump Force One, his private plane, he took credit for him becoming Florida governor in 2018.

“Ron would have not been governor if it wasn’t for me,” Trump told reporters. “So when I hear he might run, I consider that very disloyal.”

Unlike Trump, DeSantis is yet to formally launch his campaign, but is expected to cite the way he dealt with the pandemic in Florida in his attempt to win the Republican ticket.

Trump said his rival was trying to rewrite history. “There are Republican governors that did not close their states. Florida was closed for a long period of time,” he said.

Trump reserved attacks for his Democrat rivals during the speeches in New Hampshire and South Carolina, telling his audiences that under President Biden, “every day for the United States is April Fool’s Day”. Speaking in Columbia, South Carolina, his second event of the day, he said he would return to the commonsense policies that were missing at present.

Since the 2020 presidential election, which he wrongly insists he won, Trump has staged rallies that have attracted thousands of supporters. The events on Saturday, in two of the states that will be among the earliest to hold Republican primaries next year, were much smaller.

Addressing the New Hampshire Republican party’s annual meeting in Salem, Trump said he was motivated to win. “I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than I ever was,” he said. Later, addressing a hand-picked audience of senior state Republicans in Columbia, he said Biden, 80, had got almost every policy wrong since taking office.

Trump spoke for about 40 minutes in Columbia. A reporter at the event estimated that about 100 people were present.

Former US President Donald Trump, joined by members of his leadership team, speaks at a 2024 election campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina. Picture: AFP

“People are so discouraged by what has happened to our country. We will complete the unfinished business of making America great again,” he said, using his campaign slogan. “They hit back at that: Maga, Maga, Maga. It means make America great again. I’ve tried to explain that to them. The Democrats don’t quite get it.”

The event in South Carolina was designed to introduce heavyweight local figures who have already thrown their weight behind Trump’s campaign. Lindsey Graham, US senator for the state, and Henry McMaster, the governor, appeared alongside Trump.

South Carolina, which will be the first state from the south to choose a candidate, helped to ignite Trump’s campaign in 2016. He won the primary, taking about a third of the vote.

Similarly, in 2020 South Carolina finally sparked Biden’s campaign into life after he had struggled to gain traction in the earlier Democrat primaries.

Trump may have a trickier job in just over a year’s time when the state will hold its 2024 primary. Although he is still the only serious candidate to formally declare, Tim Scott, the other senator from South Carolina, and Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor and Trump’s ambassador to the UN, could join the race. Both have strong local support.

“The reason that Donald Trump is coming to South Carolina is because it’s an important state, but he’s trying to really lock up some of that support,” Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told The Hill website. “And I think that support is fairly soft. I know people who have endorsed him who have felt like they were kind of pressured into it and had to do it, but don’t plan on being with him when the election happens early next year in South Carolina.”

In an email to supporters on Sunday Trump pointed to a poll by Emerson College, released last week, showing him leading Biden in a head-to-head race by three points. The same poll showed Trump holding a 26-point lead over DeSantis among Republicans.

DeSantis is expected to formally declare in the summer, but a shadow campaign is already up and running. His team has already identified key people they want to hire to run the local races in New Hampshire and Iowa, which will also be one of the first states to pick its favoured nominee next year.

Ron DeSantis is expected to formally declare later this year. Picture: AFP

After the midterms, in which DeSantis won a landslide re-election victory, the Florida governor opened up a sizeable poll lead over Trump. One poll for The Wall Street Journal had DeSantis leading by 23 points.

The address in Columbia gave Trump the opportunity to offer some red meat to the party faithful. “We’re going to end the free rein of violent criminals in Democrat-controlled cities and keep dangerous repeat offenders locked up in jail where they belong,” he promised. “We’re going to stop the left-wing radical racists and perverts who are trying to indoctrinate our youth and we’re going to get their Marxist hands off of our children.

“We’re going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, called men and women. It’s ridiculous. We’re going to bust up the censorship regime and bring back free speech. We’re going to find the deep state actors buried in the government and fire them.”

At several times he referred to the situation on the US’s southern border with Mexico, where millions of undocumented migrants have crossed into America. The Customs and Border Protection agency reported almost 2.4 million “encounters” with undocumented migrants last year, a number that Trump said in reality was more than “15 million”. He did not produce any evidence to support the assertion.

Saying that he felt like it was April 1 every day, he listed everything that he believed had gone wrong since he left office two years ago. He accused some top officers in the military of being “woke TV generals”, and said the 2020 withdrawal from Afghanistan, when 13 military personnel were killed, was “the worst day in the history of our country”.

Biden is expected to declare his intention to seek a second term after his state of the union address to Congress on February 7. Republicans will not begin choosing a candidate until February next year, but Trump will face a fight from several other candidates.

The Times