Ron DeSantis suspends presidential bid and endorses Trump after campaign meltdown: 2024 live updates

Ron DeSantis on Sunday reluctantly endorsed Donald Trump in the presidential race.

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” Mr DeSantis said, offering matter-of-fact analysis through a forced smile without adding plaudits for Mr Trump.

“I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honour that pledge,” he continued, before adding a dig at the remaining contender, Nikki Haley. Mr DeSantis described the former UN ambassador and one-time South Carolina governor as a stand-in for “the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism”.

Mr Trump seemed unbothered by Mr DeSantis’ approach, striking a tone of camaraderie as fellow political combatants.

“I will tell you it’s not easy,” Mr Trump said on Sunday night in Rochester.

“They think it’s easy doing this stuff, right? It’s not easy.”

Donald Trump has celebrated one-time Republican rival Ron DeSantis as his newest supporter after the Florida governor ended his presidential campaign and endorsed the former president.

For Mr Trump, it has become a familiar ritual to welcome the backing of someone who once tried to take him on.

Nonetheless, it was notable at Sunday’s rally in New Hampshire to see Mr Trump praise Mr DeSantis without calling him “DeSantimonious” or “DeSanctus”, putting an end to perhaps the most bitter rivalry of Republicans’ 2024 campaign.

“I just want to thank Ron and congratulate him on doing a very good job,” Mr Trump said at the outset of his remarks.

“He was very gracious, and he endorsed me. I appreciate that, and I also look forward to working with Ron.”

Mr Trump described Mr DeSantis as “a really terrific person”.

Earlier in the day, Mr DeSantis said via video that he would be ending his campaign two days before New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation Republican primary.

“Liza Minnelli has outlived Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. The anti-LGBT bully never gained traction despite spending millions of dollars,” the account said in a post on X shortly after the Republican presidential hopeful suspended his campaign.

While New Hampshire is unlikely to face the same kind of harsh weather conditions as the Iowa caucusgoers last week, the results could be delayed by a significant amount of hand-counting or by calls for a recount by a former president who has made a habit of questioning results he doesn’t like.

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan has told election officials to release the results of the Republican primary ahead of the Democratic results if hand-counting on the left side of the aisle slows down the processing of ballots.

Read more from Gustaf Kilander:

At a Sunday event in New Hampshire, Florida representative Matt Gaetz appears to call Ron DeSantis ‘diet Trump’ just hours after the governor ended his presidential campaign.

“In a way, DeSantis endorsing us now, it really creates a contrast of ideas. Because with DeSantis and Trump, you saw a lot of the same ideas,” Mr Gaetz said. “I guess we figured out we wanted Trump instead of diet Trump.”

Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid ended unceremoniously on Sunday with a Twitter video marking the end of a campaign that had begun on the same platform. It was a ho-hum but not necessarily surprising end for a candidate who had placed a distant second in a state where he has thrown everything he had against the frontrunner and who faced a difficult primary contest calendar going ahead.

Now, the race is down to Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, the latter of whom remains the far-and-away favourite to win it all after a decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses; the former president won 51 per cent of the vote. The 2024 GOP primary has, so far, played out exactly as the polls predicted it would.

So what does Sunday’s development mean for Mr DeSantis’s two rivals for the nomination?

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Mr DeSantis used the quote while announcing his campaign suspension on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday.

However, years earlier the society honouring the memory of the two-time UK prime minister had debunked the idea that the ever-quotable politican had ever said this.

“We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers,” the organisation said in response to a 2013 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution which also used the same quote.

Michelle Del Rey has more…

Just hours before the Florida governor announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, NBC News published a scathing story detailing the pitfalls of the since-ended campaign. The report revealed Scott Wagner, CEO of the super PAC Never Back Down, spent a significant amount of time constructing a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle at the organization’s headquarters in West Des Moines, Iowa.

“Staffers are putting their dedication and devotion to electing Gov. DeSantis and they come in and the CEO, the chairman of the organization, is sitting there working on a puzzle for hours,” a Never Back Down staffer told NBC News.

The Donald Trump campaign has issued a statement on the Florida governor’s decision to drop out of the race on Sunday, per Nick Corasaniti with The New York Times.

“With only a few days left until President Donald J. Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, we are honored by the endorsement from Governor Ron DeSantis and so many other former presidential candidates,” the statement read.

The statement went on to tell voters, “it’s time to choose wisely” between Mr Trump and candidate Nikki Haley.

“Nikki Haley is the candidate of the globalists and Democrats who will do everything to stop the America First movement,” the statement continued. From higher taxes, to decimating Social Security and Medicare, and to open borders, she represents the views of Democrats more than the views of Republicans.”

Sarafina Chitika, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, released a statement in response to the Florida governor suspending his campaign.

“Ron DeSantis pinned his entire campaign’s hopes on the same extreme MAGA agenda that both Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are still running on, and now he is the latest member of the GOP to fall in line behind the original MAGA brand,” Ms Chitika said in a statement provided to The Independent.

“Just like Trump, DeSantis ran a campaign pledging to ban abortion nationwide, rip away access to health care, and gut Social Security and Medicare, while embracing election deniers and whitewashing January 6,” Ms Chitika continued. “Whichever candidate wins the race for the MAGA base will be left running on the same dangerous and unpopular anti-freedom agenda that voters will reject in November.”