Ron DeSantis swiped at Donald Trump’s age on Sunday as the two battle for the White House — prompting the former president’s camp to denounce that the Florida governor is suffering from a “mental breakdown.”
DeSantis, 45, insisted that the presidency is not a job for someone like the aging Trump, who turns 77 in June, insisting that he himself is in “the prime of my life.
“The presidency is not a job for an 80-year-old,” DeSantis told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Donald Trump is actually older on January 28, 2025, than Biden is on January 20, 2021,” the GOP challenger said, referring to the date of the president’s upcoming inauguration — and the ongoing controversy over the age of the Democratic president, who turns 81 on Monday .
“Father’s time is invincible. Donald Trump is no exception to all of that,” said DeSantis.
Meanwhile, “I’m in the prime of my life,” the conservative Florida poll boasted.
The Florida gubernatorial campaign has maintained a “crash tracker,” counting Trump’s words and outright mishaps on the GOP presidential primary campaign trail.
Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis were once allies — before battling each other for the 2024 GOP presidential nod.Getty Images
“This is not the same guy that Trump was in 2015 and ’16,” DeSantis said. “That Trump is going to show up on the debate stage, he’s going to storm. Yes, he has no color, he’s agitated, but that’s all part of the idea that he’s going to really shake things up.
“Now he’s married to a teleprompter. He is not ready to debate, and he is doing many of the same things that he promised to do in 2016 not implemented,” the governor said.
The Trump campaign scoffed at the dig.
“President Trump is crushing Ron DeSantis by historic proportions in every poll,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told The Post.
“Ron must have either hit his own head against the wall or is having a mental breakdown for him to say something stupid like that.”
DeSantis has sharpened his rhetoric against Trump in recent weeks, accusing the GOP frontrunner of calling him while enjoying a lead in the polls.
The Florida government is addressing signature issues of Trump’s 2016 run for the White House — and on which DeSantis said the former president failed to make significant progress, including building a wall on the US’s southern border to stop illegal immigration and “watering” the Swamp,’ ” aka Capitol.
Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner in the 2024 GOP primary.ZUMAPRESS.com
DeSantis said Trump sounded like a broken record during the 2024 contest by promising to tackle both again.
“Trump is a high-risk proposition as a candidate because I think the chances of him getting elected are small, but it’s low reward,” DeSantis said.
The Florida Republican insisted that Trump would be a “lame duck on Day One” if elected because he would struggle to attract good talent to his administration given his poor track record of getting things done and would also be “burdened with all these distractions.” Trump is now the target of criminal and civil prosecutions.
The former president has a 44.5 percentage point lead over DeSantis in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate.
Trump also beat Biden in state elections and critical battlegrounds.
Undeterred by the poll, DeSantis noted that Democrats and the media are keeping their powder on Trump for now.
“They are very easy on him now. I mean, they don’t talk much. … If he becomes the nominee, I mean, you’re going to see the earth scorched,” DeSantis said.
Elon Musk has faced accusations of antisemitism for a recent post on X.AP
“The whole election is going to end with a referendum on Donald Trump, and Biden is going to be able to hang out in the basement, and I think he’s going to be able to get away with it,” DeSantis warned.
The Republican presidential candidates are scheduled to hold their next debate on December 6 in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Trump has been absent from the previous three GOP debates.
There have been rumors of Trump making a surprise appearance at the next show, but so far nothing has been confirmed.
DeSantis also weighed in on the controversy surrounding Elon Musk. Last week, Musk appeared to support a post on X by a user claiming Jews have rejected “dialectical hatred of white people.”
Musk responded to the post, saying, “You have spoken the real truth.”
Ron DeSantis laments the rise of antisemitism in the US.AFP via Getty Images
The space and electric car tycoon later tried to clean things up by suggesting he was referring to the Anti-Defamation League, after his post prompted a swift backlash, accusations of antisemitism and several companies to stop advertising on X.
DeSantis, who launched his campaign at X in May, withheld judgment on the matter, insisting he didn’t read the context well.
“I’ve never seen him engage in any of that,” DeSantis said of Musk regarding online antisemitism. “So it would be surprising if that were true, but I don’t see it. So I don’t want to sit there and make a quick judgement.”
The Florida Republican underscored the prevalence of antisemitism on the left after the horrific Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian Hamas terrorists on Israel and Israel’s deadly counterattack on Gaza.
“I think in the emergence of this attack [on Oct. 7]the amount of antisemitism we see really shocks me,” he said.
“We have Jewish students running for their lives because you have an angry mob,” DeSantis said. “On the institutional side, you’ve seen this become part of the left wing.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
