A few hours earlier, at a sold-out luncheon with a crowd four times as large, Trump used his singular rhetorical style to make similar assertions. Expanding the hit list beyond Biden and Newsom to four members of California’s congressional delegation (Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Maxine Waters), Trump said, “Guess who is running your state? Bad people. It’s becoming a symbol of our nation’s decline.”

Warming to the subject matter, Trump continued: “Gavin Newsom and the far-left Communists in Sacramento…San Francisco and L.A., cities which are absolutely being destroyed rapidly on a daily basis, have given you sanctuary cities, wide open borders, vast homeless encampments, and out-of-control taxes.”

The former president also referred to Biden and his administration’s economic advisers as “lunatics,” vowed that if returned to the White House he’d investigate the “Marxist monsters unleashing mayhem” on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and called Newsom an “environmental maniac.” When it came to California’s governor, however, Trump’s heart didn’t quite seem to be in it. He quickly amended his statement to say that Newsom was appeasing California’s environmentalists “for political reasons,” adding as an aside that as president he and Newsom had worked well together.

Trump expressed no similar sentiment for his fellow Republican who occupied the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, whom he ridiculed in a lengthy riff about the time DeSantis asked for Trump’s endorsement in his first gubernatorial election. A member of Congress at the time, DeSantis was trailing far behind in the GOP primary. After he endorsed DeSantis, his campaign started soaring, Trump recalled.

“I said, 'Let’s do it,' and this guy went up like a rocket,” Trump said, claiming that he, not DeSantis, was responsible for turning Florida Republican red. Trump also boasted about receiving more than a million votes more than DeSantis did in 2020.

Trump went on to wallow in his irritation at DeSantis’ “no comment” response to a reporter’s question last year about a presidential run. “That means he's running!” Trump said. “And I started hitting him very early. I hit him hard, and he’s crashing like a bird seriously wounded in flight.”

If Trump sounded like he was making up for lost time, there was a reason: He skipped Wednesday’s debate at the scenic Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and he wasn’t able to immediately rebut criticism from DeSantis and Chris Christie implying that Trump was wimping out.

Moreover, even before the debate, DeSantis sensed it would be nearly impossible to break out of the bickering pack of seven Republican candidates, all desperate to shed their second-tier status and cut into Trump’s gaping lead.

So with the focus of the political world on California, Team DeSantis released a campaign ad a day before the debate teasing the real showdown he’s counting on to change his trajectory: a mano a mano cage match between himself and Gavin Newsom over their ideals, ideology, and records as mega-state governors.

After rattling off a series of comparisons between the state of Florida and California on violent crime, government deficits, and the economy, the ad wraps up with the words “Revival vs. Decline” flashing on the screen in bold letters against black-and-white images of a sunglass-clad DeSantis staring down a scowling Newsom.

“Florida vs. California, conservative vs. progressive – It’s the debate we should be having at the national level,” the ad quotes Fox Business host Stuart Varney intoning.

Actually, it is the debate Americans are already having – with the two governors leading the conversation joined by Trump, who likes taking pointed potshots at both Newsom and DeSantis. But there is a wrinkle, as is almost always the case with The Donald. Trump’s penchant for making all politics personal means that the three-way conversation has the feel of a tag-team wrestling match that doesn’t break along party lines: DeSantis is fighting them both.

For his part, Newsom noticed DeSantis’ pre-debate trolling – and responded with some of his own. California’s governor played the smart-alecky host showing up at the Republicans’ Wednesday debate where he extolled California’s weather, lauded the scenic Reagan library, and jousted good-naturedly with Fox News host Sean Hannity about California’s sky-high gasoline prices. Then he got down to business, taking dead aim at DeSantis. As Newsom worked the post-debate spin room, he heckled DeSantis for “taking the bait” and agreeing to the faceoff, set to take place Nov. 30 with Hannity moderating.

“DeSantis looks small debating a California governor that’s not running for president,” Newsom told a throng of reporters. “He’s getting smaller by the day.” Newsom also indicated that the animus between him and DeSantis is genuine, calling Florida’s governor a “liar” and a “hypocrite” who bullies “marginalized communities.”

Newsom insists he’s not running for president himself – at least not in this cycle – but that hasn’t stopped the swirling speculation that he’s operating a shadow campaign and is ready to jump in if Biden isn’t able to answer the bell. On Friday night in Anaheim, DeSantis fired back, hitting Newsom and Biden on gas prices, stubborn inflation, and what he cast as a collapse of the American Dream. For the first time in the history of the Golden State, he told the crowd in the Anaheim Marriott ballroom, more Americans were leaving California than arriving. Many of them were arriving in Florida he added, appreciative of lower taxes and an absence of Democrats trying to micromanage their lives.

“To me, the debate about what state is governed better, Florida or California, that debate has already been answered by people voting with their feet,” DeSantis said. Speaking less than a mile from the entrance of Disneyland, DeSantis began his speech with a puckish reference to his prominent role in the culture wars as the nemesis of the Disney Company.

It was this battle that prompted Newsom to throw down the gauntlet last year when he went up on Florida airwaves targeting DeSantis’ war on woke and his socially conservative policies on abortion and public-school curriculum.

“Freedom, it’s under attack in your state,” Newsom argued in the spot. “Republican leaders – they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.”

DeSantis returned the favor earlier this year when visiting  San Francisco, a city Newsom ran for two terms as mayor, and touring the city’s homeless encampments in the Tenderloin district, a denizen of fentanyl dealing and overdoses. He then tweeted out photos of tents and squalor, labeling the city a “dumpster fire.” 

DeSantis seems to like his chances in a battle against Biden or Newsom, but that might be fantasy land. The massive obstacle in his path isn’t a Democratic president or a Democratic governor. It’s the most recent Republican president.

In recent weeks, the gap between Trump and DeSantis has grown to a chasm, increasing as each criminal indictment against the former president has piled up at his feet. Trump is now 43.9 percentage points ahead of DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics Average of polls, a 27-point jump in six months.

That gap was on full display at the California GOP convention. Trump, the political reality TV star, attracted a larger crowd than DeSantis, Sen. Tim Scott, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy combined. He relished the attention, captivating his audience with his fiery freewheeling riffs, humorous jabs, wild exaggerations, and appalling insults.

Trump spent the first 10 minutes telling  the largely supportive audience that he would have won California – a state he lost by more than 5 million votes in 2020 – if not for a “rigged election.” The former president also promised to take on “ultra-left-wing liars, losers, creeps, perverts and freaks” that, he said, “are devouring the future of this state like a swarm of locusts.”

When it comes to rampant smash-and-grab thefts undermining retail businesses from here to Philadelphia, Trump offered a simple but shocking solution. “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store – shot,” Trump said.

He promised to stand up to “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” who he said had “ruined San Francisco,” then shifted to mock her husband, who was a victim of a brutal attack in the family’s San Francisco home last October.

“How’s her husband doing, anybody know?” he asked a crowd that laughed uncomfortably in response. “And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house – which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”

Although Trump put most of the blame for the country’s ills on Democrats, toward the end of his remarks he punched hard at DeSantis too. 

“I’m the only candidate that [Biden and the Democrats] don’t want to run against – they’ll take DeSanctimonious in about two seconds,” he remarked.

He then rattled off the results of the most recent Morning Consult poll, showing him with 63% support nationwide compared to 12% for DeSantis. And in a recent CNN poll, DeSantis fell to fifth place in the New Hampshire primary, Trump jeered.

Here in California, Trump holds an enormous, nearly 50% lead over DeSantis in the primary. Thanks to a new change in state Republican election rules, which the Republican National Committee still must approve, if Trump wins more than 50% of the March 5 primary vote, he would secure all 169 of the state’s delegates. If no candidate hits that threshold, delegates will be awarded proportionally.

By now, DeSantis is accustomed to Trump’s slings and arrows. In the ballroom Friday night DeSantis seemed more relaxed and natural, sprinkling his remarks with quotes from Reagan and offering Reaganesque flourishes about American renewal and this generation’s “rendezvous with destiny.” He appeared to acknowledge his underdog status in the race but also his commitment to soldier on in what he described as a moral obligation to reverse the country’s trajectory.

DeSantis also seemed slightly amused by all of Trump’s attention earlier in the day.

“I understand that one of my residents was here earlier saying that he turned Florida red,” he remarked. “All I will say is, Ronald Reagan made the point [that] there’s no limit to what you can do when you don’t care who gets the credit. I just wish if he was the one that turned Florida red, that he wouldn’t have turned Georgia and Arizona blue because that’s not been good for us at all.”

In an earlier Friday interview, DeSantis addressed Newsom’s attempt to ridicule him for agreeing to debate in the first place and brushed it off as disingenuous campaign jousting.

“You know Sean [Hannity] asked him to debate. He said yes. So, then he asked me,” DeSantis recounted. “I’m like, ‘I’ll do it. Let’s do it.’ And now he’s acting like ‘Why do you want to debate me?’ Well, I’m debating you because you asked to do it, so let’s go and get it done.”

“I do think it will be good, it will be instructive,” he added. “These are the types of debates America really needs to have.”