Ex-President Donald Trump will hold a rally for Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio on Nov. 6, but Gov. Ron DeSantis does not seem to be invited.
The announcement by Trump’s Save America PAC of the rally in Miami just two days before Election Day is yet another indication of the rift between Trump and his former protégé DeSantis over their apparent shared ambitions for a 2024 presidential run.
“President Trump delivered an historic red wave for Florida in the 2018 midterms with his slate of endorsed candidates up and down the ballot and molded the Sunshine State into the MAGA stronghold it is today,” the announcement stated, notably not mentioning the most prominent of those endorsed candidates: DeSantis.
Trump famously boosted DeSantis, then a congressman, with a single tweet in 2018 in the GOP gubernatorial primary against favorite Adam Putnam, the agriculture commissioner. Since then, DeSantis’ growing profile in conservative circles has reportedly driven a wedge between the two.
Unlike other Republicans who have indicated they might seek the White House in two years, DeSantis has not said he would step aside if Trump runs again. At a debate with his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, last week, DeSantis did not answer when Crist asked him if he would promise to serve his full four years as governor if he’s reelected.
DeSantis has not mentioned Trump at several of his high-profile speeches to conservative groups, including at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando.
In January, Trump blasted “gutless” politicians who have not said whether they have received a COVID-19 booster shot, something DeSantis has declined to reveal. He also took full credit for DeSantis’ 2018 victory for governor at an event at the Amway Center in Orlando in December.
“One day, he came to see me and he said, ‘It’s really important, I’d like to run for governor of Florida,’” Trump told Bill O’Reilly at the joint event. “I said, ‘Ron, people don’t know you as the guy that’s gonna run for governor.’ ... Nobody knew him.”
At one point, notorious provocateur and Trump supporter Roger Stone warned DeSantis to step aside for Trump in 2024, slamming DeSantis’s “disloyalty” to Trump and implying the former president could pull his support.
DeSantis has criticized Trump’s early handling of the pandemic and said he should have pushed back more against the initial calls for a lockdown, which DeSantis also carried out in April 2020.
“Knowing now what I know then, if that was a threat earlier, I would have been much louder,” DeSantis said last year.
Rubio has morphed from being one of Trump’s biggest critics when running against him for president in 2016 to become one of the former president’s biggest defenders.
He’s appeared at several rallies with him, including one in 2020 in which Rubio defended Trump supporters surrounding a Biden campaign bus in Texas by saying, “All the cars on the road, we love what they did.”
Rubio also voted against both Trump’s impeachment and a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Rubio faces Democratic U.S. Rep. Val Demings, D-Orlando, in the general election, for which early and mail-in voting has already begun.
____
