Donald Trump attacked his rivals for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election, particularly Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in front of an audience won over to his cause on Friday in Anaheim during the California Republican Party convention.
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“It was me who repainted Florida red (color of the Republicans), not him (De Santis),” said the former president.
Recalling the support he gave him in 2018 in his campaign for governor of Florida, Trump assured: “Without me, he was dead.”
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According to a recent NBC News survey, Donald Trump enjoys an overwhelming lead in the Republican primaries: 59% of voting intentions against 16% for DeSantis, his closest competitor.
In Anaheim, he also called Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey and one of the few candidates to sharply criticize him, a “loser.”
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On Wednesday, the former president did not participate in the second debate of Republican candidates, organized in California, preferring to campaign with auto workers in Michigan (northeast).
His competitors, including DeSantis and his former vice president Mike Pence, were all scheduled to speak separately at the convention in California.
Donald Trump, 77, once again made fun of the physical appearance of Joe Biden, whom he hopes to replace in the White House, telling a conquered audience that the 80-year-old Democratic president “can’t even get off of a scene.
Criminally charged in four cases, which range from his handling of confidential documents after his departure from the presidency to his alleged attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, Trump has once again posed himself as the victim of a justice that he considers himself in the pay of the Democrats.
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If he returns to power, he promised, he will order an overhaul of the Justice Department “to investigate every radical prosecutor in America.”
The former president also spoke about immigration, saying he wanted to “close the border” with Mexico and “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of the country.”
He did not forget to address subjects more specific to California: water wars linked to drought, management of the homeless, resumption of oil exploitation abandoned because of the priority given to renewable energies.
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Inside the room, dozens of his American flag-waving supporters waved signs with his name for the 2024 election.
Among them, some seemed defiant of their own party, in a California considered too liberal and which regularly votes Democratic.
“I’m afraid that a lot of Republicans here are only on the surface,” denounced Sharon Lyn Stein, 73 years old.
“It is lamentable that the mainstream of the Republican Party which is organizing this convention is not doing more to support President Trump,” said Karen Anthoupoulos indignantly. “In reality, they are doing more to sabotage it.”