Ron DeSantis has 2024 war chest twice the size of Trump’s

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is sitting on a pile of cash ahead of his presumptive 2024 presidential run, giving him a leg up in his potential challenge to former President Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.

DeSantis, 44, has raked in more than $110 million in political donations to his state-level campaign funds and associated PACs.

That includes around $80 million remaining in his 2022 gubernatorial re-election account, Friends of Ron DeSantis, and around $33 million in a super PAC set up to back a would-be presidential campaign, which the Florida governor is expected to launch in the coming weeks.

The figures were first reported by Politico.

By contrast, the former president’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., had a relatively paltry $55 million cash on hand as of the end of last year.

DeSantis took in a little more than $14 million in the first three months of this year, his state-level campaign committee reported, slightly less than the $18 million that Trump, 76, raised over the same period.

The two have traded barbs in recent campaign ads and statements, with the former president most recently suggesting DeSantis would never have won his first election for governor without a Trump endorsement — and calling on him to drop out of the race.

Trump — who has earned some key endorsements from House and Senate Republicans, as well as former New York Congressman Lee Zeldin — currently leads DeSantis by 28 percentage points in his bid to become the GOP’s nominee, according to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling average.

The Trump campaign got a shot in the arm in April after he became the first former president to be charged with a crime, raising around $8 million in the days following his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 counts of felony business fraud.

DeSantis has won over some former Trump donors as he prepares to enter the 2024 race. On Wednesday, he was photographed dining with Miriam Adelson and other top Republican contributors in Jerusalem, Axios reported.

Though Adelson has pledged to remain neutral during the GOP primary, she and her late husband, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, gave $90 million to Trump’s re-election campaign in 2020.

At the same dinner, DeSantis also reportedly cozied up to the former finance chairman of the Trump campaign in Colorado, Larry Mizel.

The governor is taking a whirlwind tour of Japan, South Korea, Israel and the United Kingdom this week, a trip that many see as an attempt to burnish his foreign policy image.

The Florida governor caught flak from Republican hawks earlier this year for referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” and saying the ongoing war effort was not a “vital” US interest.

DeSantis delivered two addresses in Israel, but did not speak about his plans for the presidency.