My crowd is bigger than yours, Donald Trump tells Ron DeSantis

The rivals held competing campaign events a few kilometres apart in the battleground state of New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Donald Trump addresses the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women's Lilac Luncheon in Concord on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis held competing campaign events a few kilometres apart in the battleground state of New Hampshire on Tuesday, after a row with a local women’s group.

The former president, addressing the summer Lilac Luncheon hosted by the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women in Concord, announced the winners of a raffle before telling the sell-out crowd: “I hear this is the largest one, and none of the candidates that follow me will top it.”

He declared the 2024 election “the most important battle of our lives” and promised to “evict crooked Joe Biden”, adding: “He is crooked as hell, the most corrupt president in the history of our country.”

Mr Trump, 77, took aim at the “deranged prosecutors” behind the two criminal indictments he faces as he tries to win back the White House.

“Biden ordered his top political opponent arrested. This is the greatest witch- hunt of all time. This is a form of rigging the election,” he said.

“I had such an easy life before this crap. But this stuff doesn’t hold up.”

Mr DeSantis, less than an hour’s drive away in the town of Hollis, criticised his rival’s record in office. “A lot of politicians chirp, they make grandiose promises and then fail to deliver. The time for excuses is over,” he told a town hall meeting.

New Hampshire, the second state to vote in the Republican primary race next year, is critical to securing the presidential nomination. A new Saint Anselm College poll places Mr Trump on 47 per cent support in the state, with Mr DeSantis trailing in second place on 19 per cent.

The women’s federation criticised Mr DeSantis for organising his town hall at the same time as Mr Trump’s. It accused him of an “unprecedented” breach of protocol, and “an attempt to steal focus”. His team refused to reschedule.

“By having a rival event, it really did a disservice to the voters,” Victoria Sullivan, communications director for the women’s federation, said. “(Mr DeSantis’s) team should have known that this was going to limit who he could be in front of. So it harmed his campaign.”

Mr DeSantis pledged to be “the president that finally brings the issue of the border to a conclusion” by halting the flow of migrants into the US and tackling the Mexican drug cartels that have flooded the country with fentanyl.

“We’re going to stop the invasion, fight the cartels, actually build the wall,” he said.

Mr Trump repeated his 2016 vow that he would “drain the swamp” if he regained the presidency. In Hollis, however, Mr DeSantis mocked Mr Trump’s failure to deliver on that promise. “I remember these rallies in 2016,” he said. “It was exciting: ‘Drain the swamp.’ Then two weeks after the election (Mr Trump said) ‘Oh, forget about it. Forget I ever said that.’ We didn’t drain it. It’s worse today than ever.”

THE TIMES