https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/09/ron-desantis-the-making-and-remaking-of-a-maga-heir
Like many elected Republicans, DeSantis was appalled when Trump ran for president. “Ron made more fun of Donald Trump than anyone I know,” one of the former DeSantis staffers told me. “He thought Trump was fucking nuts,” said another. Two staffers remembered DeSantis was particularly shocked by Trump’s appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Washington in December 2015. “This room negotiates…perhaps more than any room I’ve spoken to, maybe more,” Trump told the audience. “Ron came back to the office and said, ‘I can’t believe Trump said that!’ Then we pulled up old SNL videos of Trump doing Domino’s pizza commercials and stood around the computer making fun of Trump for 30 minutes.”
DeSantis pivoted after the 2016 election. He hung out at Trump’s Washington hotel, pushed a bill to defund the Mueller investigation, and shilled on Fox News. “I liked him because he was out there defending me very strongly on the Mueller hoax,” Trump told me in an interview last year. In November 2017, DeSantis earned an invitation to fly with Trump on Air Force One to a rally in Pensacola, Florida. DeSantis’s congressional staff lamented his transformation. “Ron is one of the smartest people I’ve come in contact with. He had such potential, but he became nothing but a Trump suck-up. It’s really sad,” a former staffer told me. “Ron is an intellectual. And then there’s this persona he’s a populist-like Trump figure, which is very clearly crafted,” another said.
DeSantis’s MAGA makeover paid off when he ran for governor in 2018. During the GOP primary, Trump gave DeSantis two endorsements and propelled DeSantis to close a 17-point deficit on the front-runner, the state’s moderate agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam. “Ron went through the roof as soon as I endorsed him,” Trump said. A month before the primary, DeSantis aired a campaign ad that showed him reading Trump’s Art of the Deal to his infant son, Mason, and encouraging his toddler daughter, Madison, to build a wall with toy blocks. DeSantis beat Putnam by 20 points.