Trump, DeSantis court Republican activists in California
By Tim Reid and James Oliphant
ANAHEIM, California (Reuters) -Donald Trump campaigned in California on Friday, just two days after skipping the Republican presidential debate there, looking to build support in the state with the biggest prize in his party's 2024 White House nominating race.
«With your help, we're going to win the California primary,» the former president said to a crowd of Republican activists and party members who gave him a raucous standing ovation when he took the stage at the California Republican Party convention in Anaheim, 25 miles (40 km) south of Los Angeles.
Trump is the runaway frontrunner to be the party's nominee in the November 2024 general election, and he used his speech and social media posts on Friday to continue to attack the candidates trailing far behind him.
He derided the poll deficit of his nearest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who trails Trump by 37 percentage points in the most recent Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.
«I hit him so hard he's crashing like a bird wounded in flight,» Trump said.
Speaking at the same event on Friday night, DeSantis didn't mention Trump by name, instead calling him «one of my residents», a reference to Trump's primary home, his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
DeSantis only made one gentle dig at his rival when he pointed out that Trump had taken credit earlier in the day for turning Florida more reliably Republican — rather than DeSantis who won a landslide gubernatorial election there in 2022.
«I just wish he hadn't turned Georgia and Arizona blue,» DeSantis said, referring to Trump's defeat in those battleground states when he lost the 2020 election to Democratic President Joe Biden.
Earlier in the day, Trump lobbed another avian-themed insult on
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