DeSantis Roasts Trump for Declining Abilities: He’s ‘Lost the Zip on His Fastball’ And Is ‘Wedded to the Teleprompter’
Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis seemed to suggest Donald Trump’s abilities were in decline in scathing remarks made on the campaign trail in New Hampshire on Tuesday.
Standing beside New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu (R), DeSantis said that Sununu was right to say that retail politics is about “being able to answer questions.”
“And what Donald Trump does now, he is wedded to the teleprompter. He can’t get off that teleprompter, any time he does, he says things like ‘Don’t vote.’ He’s telling people not to vote like we have all the votes we need. Really? Wait a minute, you lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016. You don’t have all the votes you need,” began DeSantis.
He continued:
And so I think that it’s just shown this is a different Donald Trump in 2015 and 16. Lost the zip on his fastball, has a sense of entitlement — all this stuff — doesn’t think he has to go through and earn it like other candidates. And that’s just not going to fly in Iowa and New Hampshire. And that’s why, you know, how this came to be with Iowa and New Hampshire along the way, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you, just having been here, I’m glad that it works this way because I do think you’ve got to earn it. I think the voters expect that. That’s the first thing. Second thing is, I think Chris has said and I’ve said, we need a candidate that can win the general election. There’s too many people that just are not going to vote for Trump at this point, is my view and I think Chris’ as well. But you have another wrinkle now with RFK Jr. as a third party, RFK Jr. will be a vessel for anti-lockdown and anti-Fauci voters if Trump is the nominee. If I’m the nominee, they all go to me because I stood up against Fauci, I’m going to clean out CDC and all those. It’s a big part of my platform. With Trump though, he he created Fauci, he elevated Fauci, he never fired him. He said that he did everything right during Covid, claims he saved 100 million lives, you know, with the mRNA vaccine and all this stuff. And I think those voters who are understandably still very frustrated with how this federal government handled Covid, and the lies that were told and all the mistakes that were made with no accountability, they’re going to want a vessel for that. And I think they may default to Kennedy. So I think he will hurt Trump way more than he would hurt any other candidate. And that makes it even a tougher uphill battle.
This is a different Donald Trump from 2016. pic.twitter.com/ygyFCIsbq2
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) October 24, 2023
DeSantis remains in a distant second place behind Trump in most national and state-level polls. Trump has eschewed attending the Republican primary debates or maintaining a busy campaign schedule as he navigates the legal peril that the four criminal indictments leveled against him this year have placed him in.
