Trump repeated criticism of DeSantis for saying he wanted two terms to enact a conservative agenda as president.
“Frankly, I wouldn’t vote for him because he said, ‘You need eight years.’ You need six months,” Trump told Sean Hannity, at one point mispronouncing the governor’s name as “DeSanctus.”
(DeSantis, for his part, told a reporter in response to similar comments from Trump on Thursday: “Why didn’t he do it in his first four years?”)
Trump and DeSantis are both facing a widening field of GOP candidates, with former Gov. Chris Christie and Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, respectively eyeing campaign launch dates next week. Mentions of both Christie and Pence drew boos from the audience at Trump’s Fox town hall.
“I don’t understand what they’re doing,” Trump said Thursday of low-polling candidates including Christie, who’s been one of Trump’s more outspoken GOP critics.
Hannity began the discussion by questioning President Joe Biden’s physical and mental health, following Biden’s fall on stage at an Air Force graduation ceremony earlier in the day.
“You can’t fall. You just can’t fall, no matter what,” Trump said, adding of a 2020 incident in which he shuffled down a ramp at West Point: “It didn’t look so good.”
The discussion with Hannity also comes weeks after the former president appeared in a town hall on CNN, which was broadly panned for allowing the former president to repeat false claims in front of a largely friendly audience.
While Trump has had a more chummy relationship over the years with Fox News than CNN, in recent weeks he’s accused the conservative network of being too aligned with DeSantis.
Trump on Tuesday called his former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany “milktoast” for presenting primary poll numbers on Fox News he said were too low (the numbers still showed him 25 points up, according to the post on Truth Social).
In a separate post earlier this month, Trump put it more plainly: “FoxNews has become the DeSanctimonious Network, but it will never work because he doesn’t have the goods.”
The same post also referenced Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and he accused Fox News of not fighting hard enough on his side. The network reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in April, after the company accused Fox of defamation over false election claims.
“After firing Tucker Carlson and refusing to fight against a VERY Corrupt and Rigged 2020 Presidential Election, which just cost them plenty of money, prestige, and RATINGS, they are a far cry from what they used to be,” Trump wrote, referencing the firing of the controversial host shortly after the settlement.