1/5/2024 0 Comments Msnbc election meltdown 2016![]() ![]() They turned to Roger Stone, the veteran political dirty trickster and longtime close adviser to Trump, who was in attendance at the event. They tried negotiating with him and asked what they could do, and finally Trump said, “Find me someone with the balls to convince me not to do it.” The advisers, though, had not yet convinced Trump of this. They worried that if the president continued picking fights, they, too, would be pulled into the battle. ![]() Gruters’s allegiance to Trump over DeSantis is well known, but Trump’s staff thought picking a fight with DeSantis onstage would overshadow the others at the event, including Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. Corey Lewandowski, then Trump’s campaign manager, was unhappy with the decision and asked Joe a simple question: “Are you on the team or not?” Gruters had not wanted to defend the comment because he considered it disrespectful to veterans. “He was a war hero because he was captured. (“He’s not a war hero,” Trump had said, to boos from the audience. Gruters was such a backer of Trump that, in 2015, he’d swallowed his pride to defend Trump in television interviews in the wake of his controversial comments about Arizona senator John McCain. As chairman of the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Gruters gave Trump two “statesman of the year” awards and cochaired Trump’s 2016 Florida campaign. Gruters and DeSantis have a notoriously icy relationship, and the senator has long been a huge Trump ally. This group included Joe Gruters, state senator and chairman of the statewide Republican Party - who had picked Trump’s rally over those held by DeSantis - and Rick Scott, who had also long favored Trump over DeSantis. If they took the stage against the backdrop of what felt like an anti-DeSantis rally, it would have made things much more difficult between them and their home-state governor, who at that point was well known for having a vindictive streak. “I mean, we did not issue him a personal invitation like we did with Rick and Marco, but he was not not invited.”Īs Trump’s speaking slot approached, his advisers urged him not to take the stage and hit DeSantis for a second night in a row some of Florida’s biggest-name Republicans were in attendance and set to speak, and it would have put them in an awkward position. He said, ‘Every statewide elected official,’” recalled a Trump adviser familiar with the planning. “He did not say Marco he did not say Rick he did not say Ron. ![]() Alex Latcham, who served as White House deputy political director during Trump’s time in office and who currently works for his campaign, called Helen Aguirre Ferré, who was by then executive director of the Florida GOP, to invite all statewide elected officials to the event. The Trump camp did not technically say DeSantis could not come, but they hadn’t invited him, either. The planning of the event itself had already stoked Trump-DeSantis intrigue because the governor was not invited, a perceived snub that spun off its own version of rivalry stories, especially because DeSantis had decided to hold his own set of competing rallies on the same day. Trump wanted to hammer DeSantis, even as staff and top advisers told him it was a bad idea, especially in Florida. Ron DeSantis and then set out to destroy him, showing how their struggle for supremacy has turned Florida into the crucible of the new GOP. 9, tells the wild inside story of how former President Donald Trump made a star of Florida Gov. The book, which will be published by Little, Brown and Company on Jan. DeSantis―the Greatest Show on Earth (or at Least in Florida) ,” a forthcoming book by NBC News senior national politics reporter Matt Dixon. ![]() Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from “ Swamp Monsters: Trump vs. ![]()
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