His presidential campaign widely seen to be listing badly, Ron DeSantis fired a broadside at supporters of Donald Trump on Saturday, calling them “listless vessels”.
“A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis told the Florida Standard.
“The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow … whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”
Truth Social is Trump’s social media platform, set up when he was suspended from mainstream platforms after the January 6 attack on Congress.
Running for re-election under four criminal indictments and 91 separate charges, Trump nonetheless dominates the Republican primary, leading polling by as much as 40 points nationally and by wide margins in key states.
DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has long been established as the strongest challenger. But amid campaign firings and reported financial struggles, that status has begun to erode, with the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy creeping up in polling.
Trump is set to skip the first Republican debate, in Milwaukee on Wednesday, in favour of an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Responding to DeSantis’s remarks to the Florida Standard, Trump aides sought to link the governor to the Democrat Trump beat for the presidency in 2016.
“DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary [Clinton] and call[s] MAGA supporters ‘listless vessels,’” Steven Cheung wrote.
A spokesperson for a Trump-aligned fundraising committee, Maga Inc, made explicit the claimed connection to remarks by Clinton which Trump successfully weaponised.
“To Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters are ‘deplorables’. To Ron DeSantis, they are ‘listless vessels’,” Karoline Leavitt said. “The truth is, Trump supporters are patriots. DeSantis must immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.”
DeSantis’s spokesperson, Bryan Griffin, said the governor was referring to supporters of Trump in Congress, not among voters.
“The dishonest media refuses to report the facts,” Griffin wrote. “Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers are ‘listless vessels’. Why? Because Trump and DC insiders feel he is entitled to your vote.
“… That’s why Ron DeSantis will be showing up on Wednesday night to debate, and Donald Trump will not.”
The Florida Standard is a conservative website run by a young Republican, Will Witt, to whom DeSantis has regularly granted interviews.
In the passage of the interview in question, the governor repeatedly targeted “establishment Republicans” and “Rinos”, meaning “Republicans in name only”.
“I think that we have a stream in our party that views supporting Trump as whether you are a Rino or not,” he said. “And so you could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you’re kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a Rino.”
DeSantis also said “there’ll be people who are huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have like incredibly liberal leftwing records that [are] really just atrocious and … then you have other people like [Texas] congressman Chip Roy, who’s endorsed me, [Kentucky] congressman Thomas Massie, these guys have records of principle.
“… Ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual. The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle … all we are is listless vessels.”
