Donald Trump falsely accuses Ron DeSantis of hugging and kissing Barack Obama

Amid Ron DeSantis’ sagging polls and campaign shakeup, former President Donald Trump piled more opprobrium on the Florida Governor in New Hampshire. But the most interesting comments had nothing to do with that, but instead featured a seemingly misremembered anecdote.

Trump seemingly conflated DeSantis and Chris Christie, when Trump was retelling the story of DeSantis asking for his endorsement in 2018.

“I actually told him if I were Abraham Lincoln, if we brought him back from the dead and if we brought George Washington back from the dead and they gave you the greatest endorsement and they hugged you and kissed you just like you did to Barack Obama just like, you know, he did and Christie did who hugged and kissed Obama harder? DeSanctus or Chris Christie?”

DeSantis never hugged Obama; however, Christie did hug the former President when Obama came to New Jersey in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.

“Time to go back to Florida and work on your insurance that’s costing everyone a fortune,” Trump said, after spotlighting a New Hampshire poll that finds DeSantis at 9%.

The former President said that DeSantis should have waited, though he added that it might now have mattered.

“He’s crashing. He’s like, he doesn’t know what happened. He goes home and he says, ‘What happened? What did I do wrong?’ You know what he did wrong. He ran. What he did wrong is he should have waited till ’28. But I don’t know if that would have held water because eventually they would have figured out, you know, you do need some personality if you’re going to be a politician.”

Trump also said he would have endorsed Adam Putnam under different circumstances.

“They never called me. I didn’t know Adam, but he was the Secretary of Agriculture. He should have called me. I would have endorsed him. Sometimes it’s the first one to call. Sometimes you don’t do it at all. But he did,” Trump said, before discussing getting DeSantis “through Andrew Gillum.”

“He turned out to be a pothead, a crackhead,” Trump said of Gillum, without evidence of those claims. “But everybody thought he was the hottest one in politics. And Ron said, ‘I won’t be able to beat him.’ I said, well, he’s the hottest man in politics. I said, ‘You can beat him.'”

Beyond those anecdotes and a lot of talk about “incredible numbers” in the polls, Trump focused his attacks on Joe Biden and had little to say about the rest of the field.

Ahead of the Trump speech, Make America Great Again spokesperson Karoline Leavitt gloated about DeSantis’ declining fortunes.

“Ron DeSantis has already delivered a political hat trick today and it’s only lunch time. The only problem? All three goals were scored on himself,” Leavitt contended.

“His New Hampshire campaign free fall has left him tied with Chris Christie in single digits, he fired his Campaign Manager after singing her praises at a recent event, and the FEC sent a notice to the DeSantis campaign that it improperly designated $2.6 million of donations as Primary funds.”

Leavitt added “that DeSantis actually started the quarter with $6.4 million to spend on the Primary instead of $9 million. DeSantis is broke. How many more Gulfstream flights can he afford?”

Others in the Trump orbit share Leavitt’s sentiments, particularly with regard to the firing of Campaign Manager Generra Peck. One source said it would take more than “moving around the deck chairs,” drawing a clear comparison between the DeSantis campaign and the Titanic.