Ron DeSantis says his ‘bulldog’ defense of Donald Trump earned 2018 endorsement

Ron DeSantis isn't sure what Donald Trump means with a long-standing nickname.

Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to discuss the biggest endorsement of his political life: Donald Trump’s in 2018.

On Saturday, the Governor contended that he earned that endorsement by defending the former President when few in Congress were.

“The whole reason he endorsed me in ’18 wasn’t the kindness of his heart. I was a bulldog in there fighting on all this stuff. That’s why he did it.”

“It’s not like he just did me a favor. I mean, like I was in the trenches when he didn’t have a lot of people that were in the trenches for him. And I did it because I wanted him to be successful because it was, it was infringing on his ability to conduct the affairs of state and get things done,” DeSantis said at a Never Back Down super PAC event in Lexington, South Carolina.

The Governor did not discount the impact of Trump’s endorsement, which observers at the time saw as powering him through the Primary and General Elections against Adam Putnam and Andrew Gillum respectively.

However, the remarks continue an ongoing reframing of the endorsement that shook up Florida politics more than six years ago.

During a November 2023 interview on “Fox & Friends,” DeSantis rebutted Donald Trump’s claim that DeSantis in 2018 “did well because (Trump) endorsed him.”

“If his endorsement was so important, why have Republicans been losing so many of these races where he’s endorsed, have fewer Governors than when he got elected President, fewer (U.S.) Senators, fewer U.S. House members,” DeSantis asked rhetorically.

On the PBD Podcast in October, the Governor distanced himself from an ad depicting him as a “pitbull” Trump defender as a naked bid for earned media.

“That’s obviously tongue in cheek. … Of course, it’s a funny video, but here’s the thing about it: When you’re doing these campaigns, you want to get as much free media as possible. So I knew that that would cause the corporate media to light their hair on fire and they did. And so they just kept playing it for me. So we didn’t even have to really pay for the ad.”

DeSantis also said he would have won in 2018 without Trump’s endorsement, which he suggested actually held him back from winning by more than 34,000 votes against Andrew Gillum.

“The test of that is I won by 34,000 with his endorsement. Four years later, he attacked me three days before the election and I won by 1.5 million votes. Trump was a factor in 2018. It didn’t matter what I did, they were going to vote against me. That was, that was the reason they viewed me as that.”