Florida Gov. DeSantis responded Tuesday to criticism by Donald Trump, saying that unlike the former president’s 2020 candidacy, voters re-elected him.
“If you take a crisis situation like covid, the good thing is that when you are an elected executive, you have to make all kinds of decisions, you have to steer that ship,” DeSantis said Tuesday at an event on education in response to a He asks about the recent attacks by Trump. “And the good thing is that people can make a judgment about that: if you get re-elected or not.”
“I am happy to say that in my case, we not only won re-election, we won with the highest percentage of votes of any Republican candidate for governor in the history of the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.
“What I would say is that that verdict has been delivered by the people of the state of Florida,” he added.
Video of DeSantis’s comments was posted on Twitter by the conservative website Townhall.
DeSantis, who was thought to be considering a 2024 run for president, also said he had grown used to constant attacks from his political rivals.
“I get out of bed, I have people attacking me from all angles. It has been going on for many years,” she said.
His comments come days after Trump, who has already launched a 2024 bid, criticized the Florida governor during campaign events on Saturday.
In interviews with reporters aboard his plane between rallies in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump called DeSantis “disloyal” and accused him of changing his views on covid vaccines.
“He promoted the vaccine as much as anyone in this country promoted it. You remember Florida shut down. Florida was closed. There were Republican governors who didn’t shut down,” Trump told reporters over the weekend.
“Florida was shut down for a long time. Remember, he closed the beaches and everything else,” Trump said of DeSantis. “You know? They are trying to rewrite history.”
DeSantis has positioned himself in recent months to the right of Trump on issues related to Covid, particularly on vaccines. He is a break with its previous support for the development and distribution of vaccines.
During a roundtable discussion with Covid vaccine skeptics last month, DeSantis asked the state Supreme Court to form a grand jury to investigate whether drug companies criminally misled Floridians about the side effects of vaccines.
DeSantis, once a vocal advocate of vaccineshe later retracted that defense. in januaryrefused to say if he even got a booster.
Meanwhile, Trump, repeating an earlier line of attack in his comments over the weekend, also accused DeSantis of being “very disloyal,” pointing to the fact that he had endorsed DeSantis during his initial gubernatorial run in 2018.
“I am the one who chose it. I chose him, he asked me for support. He was losing,” Trump said. “He was preparing to quit unless I supported him.”
“So when I hear that he might run, you know, I think of it as very unfair,” Trump said.
in a series of recent surveys, Trump has led DeSantis by 19 points or more. But there are signs that support for Trump has been waning in some parts of the country: A University of New Hampshire poll released this week showed DeSantis leading Trump 42 percent to 30 percent. New Hampshire traditionally holds the country’s first primary, following the Iowa caucuses.
Ali Vitali Y Vaughn Hillyard contributed.
