Miami’s mayor files for president, and hometown feud goes from simmer to white hot

Francis Suarez didn’t have to look far to see how rough a presidential campaign can get when the Miami mayor filed his candidacy papers Wednesday. A fellow Miami politician was there to remind him on national television.

“I will never support Francis Suarez,” Carlos Gimenez, a former Miami-Dade County mayor, said on Fox News that afternoon.

The words marked the national unveiling of an enduring local feud that at one point had the Miami area’s two most prominent mayors sniping publicly over the pandemic response, hurricane photo-ops and who gets to write the White House about Miami’s airport.

Now a Republican member of Congress representing Florida’s 28th District, Gimenez is backing former President Donald Trump in the GOP primary. He said this week he wasn’t asked to be a campaign surrogate against Suarez.

Instead, he’s using his platform to revive a squabble that had mostly gone quiet once Gimenez left County Hall for Washington in late 2020. Those days are over. On Thursday, Actualidad Radio posted an excerpt from an interview Gimenez gave about Miami’s mayor.

“Francis Suarez was my niece’s boyfriend,” Gimenez said. “I know him very well. He’s a fraud.”

Here are some notable moments from the Suarez-Gimenez feud:

▪ A rift over a strong mayor: Though Gimenez, a former Miami manager and a city resident, endorsed Suarez when he won his first term in 2018, the two split over the new mayor’s bid to expand his powers. Gimenez raised money against Suarez’s referendum campaign to create a “strong mayor” form of government for Miami, instead of the current system where a city manager oversees operations. Voters rejected the plan.

▪ Find your own port: In 2019, Suarez planned a press conference at Port Miami to celebrate a city relief drive for the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian. A cruise ship would be delivering the supplies. The hiccup came when Gimenez learned about the event at the county-owned port and had it stopped. “This is not about doing photo ops,” Gimenez said.

▪ Miami gets it right on Ultra: An early test on COVID was whether to cancel large events while local governments awaited reports of a local outbreak. Miami canceled the Ultra Music Festival in the first days of March 2020, a decision Gimenez criticized as an over-reaction before scrapping large county gatherings. Suarez generally advocated for stricter COVID measures than what Gimenez was imposing by emergency order. “We have led, and the county has followed, on almost everything,” Suarez said at the time.

▪ Who speaks for the airport?: One week in April 2020, the Trump administration received two letters from Miami regarding flights from COVID hot spots in the United States and abroad. Suarez wanted them halted, and Gimenez had his airport director write a letter to Washington noting the Miami mayor had no authority over the county’s Miami International Airport. The flights continued.