(GoRealNewsNow.com) – Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination, has predicted that his closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, will soon lose the second spot in the race because he is a “lousy candidate” who “has no personality.”
The former president’s comments come as multiple polls show his lead on DeSantis, which already was dozens of points, to be expanding, and weeks after Florida’s governor announced a reboot of his presidential campaign, laying off a third of its staffers.
“He’s crashing badly,” Trump said of DeSantis in a Breitbart News interview, mocking the latter’s campaign reboot.
“This is his third one,” the former president added.
When asked why his rival’s campaign seemed to be failing, he said DeSantis only won the GOP primary and got elected governor of Florida in 2018 thanks to his endorsement.
“He’s got no personality. He just has no personality. The only reason he won in the first place was because I endorsed him,” Trump declared.
“He was dead. He was down by 30-something points to Adam Putnam, who was the Secretary of Agriculture [of Florida]. He came and asked me if I would endorse him. I didn’t know Adam Putnam, and I endorsed Ron, and he went up like a rocket ship as soon as I endorsed him. But that wasn’t him going up,” the former president elaborated.
He forecasted that other GOP presidential nomination hopefuls would soon surpass Florida’s governor.
“People said he was a lousy candidate. He turned out to be a lousy candidate. I don’t think he’s going to be second very long. It looks like he’s being superseded by others or getting very close,” Trump stated.
The report notes his assessment that DeSantis would never have been elected governor without his support was “accurate.”
“Poll shows Trump endorsement gives DeSantis an edge in Florida governor’s race,” read a 2018 Politico headline. The Tampa Bay Times reported that DeSantis’s victory over Putnam in the Republican gubernatorial primary was “Fueled By Trump.”
The report also points out that DeSantis has just fallen into third place behind Trump and Nikki Haley in the polls in Haley’s home state of South Carolina and behind Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio.
