'Squabbles and betrayals': These former Trumpworld insiders are now all in for Ron DeSantis

05 May 2023

To see how deep passions run among Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis supporters, one need only compare what Ann Coulter and Kari Lake have had to say.

Firebrand author and pundit Coulter is an ardent cheerleader for Florida Gov. DeSantis and is urging Republicans to rally around him as their 2024 presidential nominee. On Substack in April, Coulter wrote, "Democrats are playing Republicans like a fiddle. The left's sole objective is to make Trump the Republicans' 2024 presidential nominee. He's already lost three election cycles for the GOP; why not make it four?"

On the other hand, Lake — the far-right MAGA Republican and conspiracy theorist who lost to Democratic now-Gov. Kari Lake in Arizona's 2022 gubernatorial race — is urging DeSantis not to run and has called for Republicans to cancel their presidential primary and nominate Trump right now.

DeSantis has yet to make an official announcement, but he appears to be gearing up for a presidential run. And if DeSantis enters the race, tensions between the Trump and DeSantis camps will only escalate in the months ahead.

Daily Beast reporters Zachary Petrizzo and Jake Lahut take a look at those tensions in an article published on May 5. Trumpworld, they stress, is furious over former Trump employees who are now in the DeSantis-for-president camp. Two of those DeSantis supporters are Matt Wolking and Erin Perrine, who were part of Trump's 2020 communications team but have joined a pro-DeSantis super-PAC.

"In the weeks that have followed," Petrizzo and Jake Lahut report, "Wolking's move has only continued to curdle the already sour relationships between the camps of the GOP's two leading presidential contenders — and set the tone for the inevitable squabbles and betrayals that are to come in the 2024 race…. In typical Trumpworld fashion, loyalists are promising that former Trump staffers who work for DeSantis will face the ex-president's considerable appetite for revenge."

A GOP operative, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Beast that Trump and his allies will greatly intensify their attacks on DeSantis.

According to that source, "DeSantis operatives are taking lame shots at Trump and then talking to Trump operatives like, ‘This is just the job, we're still cool.' Meanwhile, Trump operatives are planning to rip out (DeSantis') liver and eat it with a nice chianti before making sure anyone who signed on to work for him is permanently relegated to the Never Trump hinterlands of low-dollar political consulting."

The source said of DeSantis' team, "They're dealing with savages and acting like it's a game. These people are playing for keeps, and the DeSimps aren't ready for it."

The "chianti" comment was seemingly inspired by the 1991 horror movie "The Silence of the Lambs," starring Anthony Hopkins as diabolical serial killer Hannibal Lector.

Read the Daily Beast's full report at this link.

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