DeSantis Won’t Say If He’d Support Trump Against Biden (Cue the Truth Social Meltdown)

Something you’ve probably picked up on over the last several months is that Donald Trump has a problem with Ron DeSantis. Specifically, the ex-president is enraged that the governor of Florida has decided to run in the 2024 presidential election—an act Trump views as hugely disloyal given that he supported DeSantis‘s 2018 bid for governor. To date, Trump has expressed his anger on the matter by:

All of which is to say, it’s not hard to imagine how the ex-president is going to react when he hears that DeSantis will not commit to supporting him in the 2024 general election, should the ex-president win the GOP nomination and go up against Joe Biden—whose potential reelection the Florida governor has warned will render the country “unrecognizable.”

Per Politico:

Florida governor Ron DeSantis declined on Thursday to say whether he would support Donald Trump if the former president becomes the Republican nominee to challenge President Joe Biden in 2024. DeSantis, who launched his own presidential campaign last month, was asked whether he would “support” in the wake of Trump’s recent barrage of criticism over the governor’s handling of COVID-19. DeSantis sidestepped that part of the question and instead said Trump was “full of it” for criticizing how DeSantis responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.… Make America Great Inc., the super PAC supporting Trump, put out a statement asserting, “DeSantis is showing his true colors with this response. He is not an America First conservative and he is out of touch with Republican voters.”

The Republican National Committee earlier this month announced qualifying standards for its August presidential debate. One of the requirements is that participants will commit to supporting the eventual Republican nominee and pledge that they will not participate in any outside debates.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, 2024 GOP candidates with much less of chance of beating Trump than DeSantis, have called on the RNC to waive the requirement in light of Trump’s recent indictment by the Justice Department. (In a previous interview with Politico, Hutchinson said, reasonably: “I’m not going to vote for him if he’s a convicted felon. I’m not going to vote for him if he’s convicted of espionage, and I’m not going to vote for him if he’s [convicted of] other serious crimes. And I’m not going to support him.”

Incidentally, Trump himself has not said if he will support the next Republican presidential nominee regardless of who that person is. “It would have to depend on who the nominee was,” he told a conservative radio host in February.

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