'Small, pathetic man': California's Gov. Gavin Newsom adds venom to DeSantis' growing beef list

Between his feud with Trump, then Disney and now California Governor Gavin Newsom, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hasn’t made many friends since he officially launched his presidential bid during a turbulent announcement on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk at the end of May.

DeSantis has struggled to gain ground among voters, trailing behind former President Donald Trump by about 32 points, according to the latest poll analysis from FiveThirtyEight.

The Florida governor’s latest feud comes after Newsom accused DeSantis of flying more than a dozen migrants to Sacramento, California, after traveling from Texas to New Mexico after they had already been processed by officials and received court dates for their asylum cases.

Here’s a running list of everyone DeSantis is currently beefing with.

DeSantis' split with Donald Trump

Trump and DeSantis, once close allies, now find themselves political rivals as they vie to become the 47th U.S. president. It was DeSantis who regularly came to Trump’s defense during investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump touted himself as the driving force behind DeSantis’ popularity during his gubernatorial bid in 2018, and DeSantis thanked Trump during his victory speech, saying “I think we have a great partnership.”

That partnership remained intact, even after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election as Trump floated the idea of having DeSantis as his running mate in 2024, something that is likely unconstitutional.

It wasn’t until 2022 — as DeSantis’ popularity rose among Republican ranks and it became more and more clear that he would become a presidential contender — that Trump began tooting a different horn. Ron “DeSanctimonious” was the new moniker Trump used to describe the Florida governor days before the 2022 midterm election.

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After DeSantis won his reelection in 2022, Trump called him an “average” Republican and lambasted him for not ruling out a 2024 presidential bid. Trump’s attacks against DeSantis have only escalated since.

“DeSantis got elected because of me. You remember he had nothing. He was dead. He was leaving the race. He came over and he begged me, begged me for an endorsement,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in February. “He said, ‘If you endorse me, I’ll win.’ And there were tears coming down from his eyes.”

And when DeSantis’ presidential announcement on Twitter, which was plagued by an assortment of technical issues, Trump posted a video on Truth Social of a “Ron” rocket falling over and exploding.

DeSantis has been reluctant to engage with Trump. The governor has criticized investigations against the former president but has thrown subtle jabs over his hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and indirectly criticized Trump by saying Republicans need to end the “culture of losing” the party has seen in recent years.

DeSantis vs. Disney

DeSantis’ fight with Disney is perhaps his most infamous and controversial. Disney World is Florida’s largest single-site employer, having more than 75,000 cast members and paying $1.146 billion in state and local taxes, according to its website.

Last year, DeSantis declared war on the Magic Kingdom after then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek called DeSantis urging him to veto Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, a controversial bill passed in 2022 that prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms.

After the call, Disney pledged to work toward repealing the law, which incited DeSantis. “I think they crossed the line,” DeSantis said about Disney during a press conference at the state Capitol. “We’re going to make sure we’re fighting back when people are threatening our parents and threatening our kids.”

The feud quickly escalated after DeSantis expanded a special session on redistricting to look into repealing Disney’s five-decade-old special district. Florida lawmakers quickly wrote, debated and approved Senate Bill 4, which dissolved the district on June 1.

Disney vs. DeSantis timeline: What happened when Florida's governor took on the Mouse

DeSantis then announced that the state would take control of the district, renaming it the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District and putting the board appointments under his control. The plan also would shield local taxpayers by putting the $700 million in outstanding debts onto Walt Disney Co.

On the day before the Florida House voted to establish the new board, Reedy Creek and Disney quietly but publicly discussed and approved two contractual agreements that put control over a lot of what Reedy Creek used to handle under Disney's control for the next 30 years. The new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District didn't discover this until the end of March.

Disney filed a lawsuit in April, saying that Florida's governor led a "targeted campaign of government retaliation" against the company. The lawsuit alleges five different violations of Disney’s constitutional rights by DeSantis, including two free speech violations, a property rights violation, a due process violation and a violation of the contracts clause.

Gavin Newsom pipes up about New College takeover, then migrants arrive in California

The feud between governors might seem like something new, but the migrant flights is only the latest incident in a series of incidents involving each other over the years that mostly involve criticism regarding how the states are run, hitting on everything from book bans and guns.

In April, Newsom made a surprise visit to meet with students from the New College of Florida at the North Sarasota Public Library where he blasted DeSantis’ policies.

“Fifty years of progress," Newsom said. "Fifty years on voting rights, on civil rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, contraceptive rights, all of that at threat, state after state, led by your state and your governor with a zest for demonization and othering people.”

Who is Gavin Newsom? California governor throwing verbal jabs at Ron DeSantis. Who is Gavin Newsom?

Now Newsom is recommending criminal charges be brought against DeSantis around the same time Bexar County Sheriff’s Office filed criminal charges over the Martha’s Vineyard flight last September when the Florida governor had 49 migrants from San Antonio flown to Massachusetts.

While Florida officials say that the migrants were “willingly” flown to California, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is investigating the case, says the migrants were approached by two women who spoke broken English promising them jobs, according to the Associated Press.

Newsom lashed out at DeSantis after the flight, calling him a “small, pathetic man.”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: DeSantis' feuds include Trump, Disney and now Gavin Newsom