Florida’s Governor says rumors that he wants to work in the White House are exaggerated.
Amid reports from Axios that President Donald Trump said Ron DeSantis was “begging” to be Attorney General recently, DeSantis was asked about his previous linkage with potentially succeeding Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary.
“I was never offered or asked for anything,” DeSantis told interviewer Graham Bensinger. “I know my name got thrown out there. It’s never anything I’ve aspired to do.”
But DeSantis did leave the door open to taking a position if he “could be beneficial.”
“I’m a service-oriented guy,” DeSantis said. “So I would never rule anything out. But I would say, when you hear my name ever mentioned, that’s just people trying to create fodder. It’s definitely not me trying to position. It’s just not something that I’ve really tried to do.”
A DeSantis spox told Axios’ Marc Caputo that accounts of the Governor’s interest in a gig after his term ends this year are “fake rumors.”
Trump is reported to have described DeSantis as begging him for help before, including when he got the President’s endorsement for his first run for Governor in 2018.
“He was like a beggar. I could have said: ‘Drop to your f***ing knees, Ron,’” Trump allegedly told confidantes in 2023.
However, the relationship seems to have mended since. Trump and DeSantis have golfed together on numerous occasions and DeSantis has been central to Trump’s efforts to reform college sports’ revenue model related to name, image and likeness.
“We may have some skirmishes even in the future (I doubt it) but I will always come back. We have blood that seems to match pretty well,” Trump said last year at the launch of “Alligator Alcatraz.”
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