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A top GOP donor who previously backed Donald Trump has announced that he will be supporting Ron DeSantis in the 2024 election.
Hal Lambert, founder and CEO of Texas-based Point Bridge Capital, said he wants to "do a lot to help DeSantis win" amid strong speculation the Florida governor will confirm his presidential campaign in the coming days.
Lambert, who set up an exchange-traded fund named after the former president's Make America Great Again 2016 campaign slogan, MAGA ETF, and previously served on Trump's inaugural committee in 2016, told the New York Post that he decided to back DeSantis after meeting with him and his wife in Florida three weeks ago.
Lambert said he was also put off by Trump's recent CNN town hall, where the former president continued to falsely claim the 2020 election was "rigged."
"What voters who didn't vote for Trump in 2020 are going to vote for him this time based on his performance? I don't think anyone will," Lambert told the Post. "We can't talk about things from four years ago that can't be changed. Trump is going to have a difficult time winning the general election. The election won't be about Joe Biden's bad record. It will be a referendum on Trump instead."
It is reported that DeSantis will file paperwork declaring his presidential candidacy on May 25 to coincide with a donor meeting in Miami, before a formal announcement a few days later.
While DeSantis has long been thought to be Trump's biggest challenger in the 2024 GOP primary, the governor has been falling further and further behind the former president in the polls over the past few weeks.
According to a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll of 1,500 people taken on May 17, conducted exclusively for Newsweek, Trump leads a hypothetical Republican primary with 77 percent of the vote, with DeSantis a distant second on 8 percent.
Addressing DeSantis's recent poor polling, Lambert suggested that Trump's lead will start to erode once the Florida governor officially enters the race.
"Trump's support will drop under 50 percent," Lambert said.
Responding to the endorsement, DeSantis's political team press secretary Bryan Griffin told Newsweek: "Much to the media's chagrin, this proves that donors continue to be impressed by Governor DeSantis and support him in bringing his successes to the national stage. Clearly the media's shared talking points for that narrative were yet again backed by nothing but their agenda."
In a statement to the Post, a spokesperson for Trump said: "President Trump is crushing all other candidates and the poll numbers—both nationally and statewide—show that Americans are rallying behind the America First movement he built from the ground up. Conversely, DeSantis' shadow campaign is flailing and his support has sunk to historic lows."
Lambert also suggested DeSantis would do a better job of controlling the U.S.-Mexico border than President Joe Biden and Trump, who famously vowed to build a wall across the entire border to crack down on migrant crossings. Lambert also said DeSantis will push back on the Democratic "craziness" of promoting green energy policies, instead of fossil fuels.
Lambert is not the first GOP donor to announce they will not be backing Trump at the next election. Billionaire conservative Charles Koch's network of donors, Americans for Prosperity, and the influential Club for Growth have said they will not back Trump in 2024.
The New York Post, which Trump previously described as his favorite newspaper, also turned on the former president in the wake of the GOP's poor performance in the 2022 midterms and is now endorsing DeSantis.
Newsweek has contacted Trump's office for further comment.
Update 5/22/2023, 10:43 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Bryan Griffin.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more