Former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner in the GOP presidential race, closed out a daylong event at the Republican Party’s Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimmee on Saturday with an 80-minute address filled with mockery — bashing GOP challengers Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, plus President Joe Biden.
Trump also joked about himself — he faces 91 counts on four separate criminal cases, only boosting his poll numbers.
“I got indicted four times in the period of around 90 seconds. If I fly my plane over a blue state, I have to go to a grand jury the next day,” he said.
Trump, who resides in Palm Beach and has refused to attend GOP presidential debates, began his appearance Saturday night by bringing to the stage a handful of Republican state lawmakers who had previously endorsed DeSantis for president but dumped him on Saturday to announce their new support for Trump.
It was clearly a move designed to embarrass DeSantis — Trump has attacked him all campaign season after the Florida governor chose to challenge Trump directly for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Among those who joined Trump on the stage was state Sen. Debbie Mayfield, a former Senate Majority Leader and now the chair of the powerful Senate rules committee. House lawmakers on the stage included Webster Barnaby, Jessica Baker, Kevin Steele and Paula Stark, all of whom had been part of the nearly 100 state GOP lawmakers who announced in May that they were endorsing DeSantis right before he had made his candidacy for president official. Those House member are generally from Central Florida and Duval County.
Two other state House lawmakers who had remained neutral so far— Hillsborough County’s Mike Beltran and Miami-Dade’s David Borrero — also came on stage to show their support for the former president.
(Earlier Saturday, DeSantis downplayed the lawmakers reversing themselves, telling a pool reporter that, “Look, this happens in these things. We’ve had flips the other way in other states. It’s a dynamic thing. I mean, politicians do what they’re going to do.”).
Overall, the GOP presidential race has not been a close contest. Trump has been dominant in all of the early state and national polls since late spring, with DeSantis a distant second (and perhaps about to fall to third behind former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who did not attend the event).
At the GOP event, Trump spent a few minutes mocking the man he’s dubbed “DeSantimonius.”
“We hit him hard and now he’s like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said.
The next GOP presidential debate is scheduled for this Wednesday night in Miami, but with his massive lead in the polls, Trump will not attend. Instead he’ll hold his own rally in nearby Hialeah.
“The last debate had the lowest ratings in the history of presidential debates. Did you know that? And this one should do slightly worse,” Trump said.
About 9.3 million people tuned into that debate, which NBC News reported was the lowest rated debate since the start of the 2016 election cycle when Trump first ran for president.
Trump went on to mock former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, both of whom were booed on Saturday after they dared to criticize Trump.
“He is NOT a fat pig!” Trump yelled to the crowd, responding to an apparent comment from a member of the audience. “I’m responding. He is not a fat pig,” Trump continued, clearly enjoying saying the words again, as the crowd ate it up.
On policy, Trump spent extensive time bashing “Crooked Joe Biden” on a number of fronts, such as immigration.
Trump said if elected, he would enact”the largest mass deportation ever in our country,” and said that he would “terminate any work permits for illegal aliens and demand Congress send me a bill outlawing all welfare payments to illegal migrants of any kind.”
He also repeated his familiar tropes about the 2020 election being stolen from him, and a theme from 2020 that there is something suspect with voting by mail, despite the fact that the Republican National Committee announced months ago that the party would now embrace that style of voting.
Trump spent the majority of his speech blasting President Joe Biden on a number of fronts, including the current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which he said would not be happening under his watch.
“The attack would never have been made,” Trump said specifically about Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. “All of these people would be alive. The cities would be thriving.”
The former president also said that “we are very close to World War III,” a comment that drew cheers from the crowd.
Trump said if there were such a war, “this would be obliteration” because it would involve nuclear weapons. He then said to prevent that, if elected he would build a “state of the art missile defense shield” that “will be jobs for America.”
In addition to the presidential candidates, the Florida Freedom Summit also featured other Republicans such as U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz and Byron Donalds, and top state officials Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez, Attorney General Ashley Moody, Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson.
This article originally appeared in florida phoenix