Despite a rough start out of the gate for Florida Governor and now 2024 candidate Ron DeSantis, it appears he’s finally ready to throw punches at former President Donald Trump.

In the months leading up to Wednesday nights announcement, Trump had ramped up his smack talk on DeSantis, oddly going after the governor’s covid response, the very reason DeSantis became a household name amongst conservatives.

The most notable, coming from an appearance by Trump on the Full Send Podcast, saying, “I’m putting out the Covid numbers, he didn’t do well on Covid. He had more deaths than almost every country in Florida. I hate to say it cause Florida’s my state, but he did not do well.”

In a phone interview with radio host Glenn Beck for the Thursday edition of The Glenn Beck Program, DeSantis finally punched back against those claims. A clip from their exchange began circulating Twitter via Citizen Free Press.

“I think he did great for three years, but when he turned the country over to Fauci in March of 2020, that destroyed millions of people’s lives,” DeSantis said. “In Florida, we were one of the few that stood up, cut against the grain, took incoming fire from media, bureaucracy, the left, even a lot of Republicans, had schools open, preserved businesses.”

“Florida, since Covid has outperformed virtually any state in the country, when you look at all these significant metrics, I mean, we’re booming,” he added. “We’ve got people moving in here. Wealth is coming in here. And so I think when people look back — that 2020 year was not a good year for the country as a whole. It was a situation where Florida started to stand alone. So I think that that’s important contrast.”

Watch above via The Glenn Beck Program.

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