Donald Trump bashes ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’, brags on polls, despite legal defense

Despite defending the former President amid legal challenges, Ron DeSantis isn’t escaping criticism during the speeches of 2024 opponent Donald Trump.

During the Georgia Republican Convention in Columbus, the former President offered reminders of his sizable poll lead over DeSantis. The attacks come even after DeSantis has offered defenses of the legally-embattled Trump on Twitter and on the campaign trail, in the wake of dozens of federal counts Trump faces regarding his retention of classified documents.

“Big poll after big poll after big poll,” Trump said, citing the most recent Morning Consult poll specifically.

“We lead the field by 34 points with Trump at 56, DeSanctimonious at 22, Pence at seven,” Trump said.

Trump also touched on the “Clarity Campaign poll,” where he’s “up by 56 points. Trump is at 69. DeSanctimonious is at 13.”

Trump also touched on “the Emerson poll of Iowa,” and offered another allusion to DeSantis’ alleged disloyalty along the way.

“You endorse people. You get them elected … you get involved, you endorse them, you do other things, you get them up, they win the election in a landslide and then they say we’re looking forward to running against Trump,” Trump said. “Oh, that’s nice. Now, they are not looking so forward to it anymore.”

“But in the Emerson poll of Iowa, we’re leading by 42 points with Trump at 62%.”

After the poll exegesis, Trump attacked DeSantis for various policy positions he held in Congress, including raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare, and supporting a national sales tax.

“And unlike my competitor who I got elected, by the way, Ron DeSanctimonious, who voted to gut Medicare and voted to gut Social Security three times and to raise the retirement age to 70,” Trump said, “I will always protect Medicare and social security for our great nation.”

Trump accused DeSantis of wanting to “decapitate Medicare and Social security and you earn those things, you know, you earned them for a long time.

“But when a guy wants to do it and then they run and they say ‘No, we’re, you know, we don’t want to do it. We’re only kidding. No, we don’t want to do it.’ They always go back to doing it.”

“He also wants to put a national sales tax of 23% on all of our citizens. And you don’t want that. That’s very bad for people that don’t have a lot of money. You’re going to be paying the same sales tax as rich people,” Trump said.

“I don’t think that’s going to work too well, but he wanted to do that and he fought hard to do it because he’s a disciple of Paul Ryan and Paul Ryan is a disaster.”

On Friday night, the Governor alluded to Trump’s legal issues regarding retaining classified documents, invoking principles of whataboutism to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a political speech in North Carolina.

“When I was in Congress, I remember … Hillary had the e-mails with the classified and my view was, ‘Well, gee, you know, as a naval officer, if I would have taken classified to my apartment, I would have been court-martialed in a New York minute.’ And yet they seem to not care about that,” lamented DeSantis.

The Governor then asked rhetorically, if there was a “different standard for a Democrat Secretary of State versus a former Republican President.”

“I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody and make sure we all know the rules. You can’t have one faction of society, weaponizing the power of the state against factions that it doesn’t like,” DeSantis said. “And that’s what we’ve seen.”

DeSantis made the comments Friday night at the North Carolina Republican Party State Convention. While he didn’t mention Trump by name, the remarks were essentially an extended version of a tweet so valued by the former President’s political operation that it was spotlighted in an email showing intraparty support.

“The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” DeSantis tweeted. “We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden?”

The Trump release didn’t include DeSantis’ last sentence: “The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.”