Former President Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis Monday traded barbs about the Republican war on supposedly “woke” Disney.
After the Florida governor accused Trump of backing the media giant, the ex-president hit back by blaming DeSantis for allowing Disney to drift to the left on his watch.
“He’s taken the side of Disney in our fight down here in Florida. I’m standing for parents, I’m standing for children,” DeSantis said in a Memorial Day appearance on Fox News.
Trump slammed DeSantis, although he agreed that “Disney has become a Woke and Disgusting shadow of its former self.”
That sounded like a shift from Trump’s previous message that “The Little Mermaid” filmmaker had outsmarted DeSantis by yanking a $1 billion investment in Florida.
“This all happened during the Governorship of ‘Rob’ DeSanctimonious,” Trump wrote on his social media site, using his favored nickname for DeSantis. “He should have stopped it long ago.”
Trump did not say what DeSantis should have done to force Disney to take a more right-wing path, but he suggested he could have done better.
“Would have been easy to do – Still is!” the former president added.
The war of words ironically came as Disney scored a massive win at the box office as “Mermaid” earned $99 million in its opening weekend, putting it at No. 5 on the all-time list of Memorial Day weekend debuts.
DeSantis has been squabbling with the state’s biggest taxpayer since last year when Disney denounced his “Don’t Say Gay” law that restricted discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in public schools.
The governor scrapped a quasi municipality that Disney used for decades to run its theme park empire in central Florida and even threatened to build a prison near the kid-friendly mecca.
Disney hit back by suing to block some of DeSantis’ moves and scrapped plans to build a $1 billion corporate center in Orlando, which would’ve brought 1,200 high-paying jobs to Florida.