Trump Claims Ron DeSantis Shed Actual Tears While Begging for His Endorsement

Last month, Donald Trump said that if Ron DeSantis ends up jumping into the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he’ll “handle” the Florida governor “the way I handle things.” Obviously, this did not mean that he’ll simply run a better campaign and/or hire a therapist to teach him breathing exercises and think calming thoughts. Rather, it was clearly a pointed reference to the way the ex-president has “handled” his real and perceived competition in the past, i.e., through threats, intimidation, and insults. And he’s wasted no time doing just that.

In an interview on Thursday, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he was single-handedly responsible for getting DeSantis elected as governor in 2018. While this is a claim Trump has made before, this time he added a bit more flourish to the story. “Ron DeSantis got elected because of me,” he told Hewitt. “You remember, he had nothing, he was dead, he was leaving the race, he came over and he begged me, begged me, for an endorsement. He was getting ready to drop out…. He said, ‘If you endorse me, I’ll win,’ and there were tears coming down from his eyes.”

He later added that once he rubber-stamped DeSantis’s campaign, “everything collapsed” for primary opponent Adam Putnam, and that the endorsement got DeSantis “past the crackhead [Andrew Gillum], who was the hottest person in the Democratic Party at the time,” in the general election.

Is the story of DeSantis crying while begging for Trump’s approval actually true? On the one hand, this sounds a lot like Trump’s famous “sir” stories, which are crafted to make him look good but tend not to have a basis in reality. (It also sounds tonally similar to his insults about people doing things “like a dog.” In fact, we’re honestly surprised he hasn’t yet claimed DeSantis begged him “like a dog,” but perhaps that’s coming.) On the other, DeSantis was once such a huge fan of Trump that he made an entire, hugely embarrassing campaign video about his love for the guy.

So, it’s hard to say.

In related news, during the same interview with Hewitt, Trump refused to say if he would support the next Republican presidential nominee regardless of who that person is. “It would have to depend on who the nominee was,” he said, which is not dissimilar to the answer he gave a few years ago when asked if he’d accept the outcome of the 2020 election regardless of the winner.