• DeSantis said in New Hampshire Trump is ‘wedded to a teleprompter’
  • He brought up Trump’s remarks Monday saying ‘don’t worry about voting’
  • ‘Wait a minute, you lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016,’ said DeSantis

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unloaded on rival Donald Trump with some of his sharpest language yet, calling the former president someone who has ‘lost the zip on his fastball.’

DeSantis, 45, grabbed the attack from Trump’s wheelhouse. Trump, 77, regularly mocks Joe Biden, 80, as someone who has lost a step, ridiculing him for taking the ‘baby stairs’ on Air Force One and pointing out times the president has botched his stage directions.

He also aimed directly at one of the odd diversions from Trump’s speech in Derry, New Hampshire, Monday, where he told a crowd it was more important to take part in poll-watching activities than to cast votes.

‘And what Donald Trump does now, he is wedded to the teleprompter. He can’t get off that teleprompter, any time he does, he says things like “Don’t vote”‘, DeSantis said while campaigning in New Hampshire.

‘He’s telling people not to vote like we have all the votes we need. Really? Like, wait a minute, you lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016. You don’t have all the votes you need.’

Trump told the crowd, ‘We have to be careful. You’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to watch those voters. You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting. We’ve got plenty of votes.

DeSantis, who trails Trump by more than 40 points in the latest USA Today / Suffolk poll, then said his competitor was ‘different’ than he was during the 2016 election, when he beat Clinton in the electoral college after an angry contest.

‘And so I think that it’s just shown this is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and 16. Lost the zip on his fastball, has a sense of entitlement — all this stuff. Doesn’t think he has to go through and earn it like other candidates,’ DeSantis said, with his wife Casey DeSantis standing nearby.

Trump has said he plans to skip the third presidential debate, this one in Florida not far from his Mar-a-Lago residence.

‘And that’s just not going to fly in Iowa and New Hampshire. And that’s why, you know, how this came to be with Iowa and New Hampshire along the way, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you, just having been here, I’m glad that it works this way because I do think you’ve got to earn it. I think the voters expect that. That’s the first thing,’ he said, Mediaite reported.

He appeared alongside New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who has called for Republicans to back a candidate besides Trump.

‘Second thing is, I think Chris [Sununu] has said and I’ve said, we need a candidate that can win the general election. There’s too many people that just are not going to vote for Trump at this point, is my view and I think Chris’ as well.’

He then said there was ‘another wrinkle’ with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. entering the race – and potentially drawing more votes from Trump than he would from Biden, after jumping the Democratic party and launching an independent run.

‘RFK Jr. will be a vessel for anti-lockdown and anti-Fauci voters if Trump is the nominee,’ he said.

‘If I’m the nominee, they all go to me because I stood up against Fauci,’ he claimed. ‘I’m going to clean out CDC and all those. It’s a big part of my platform. With Trump though, he created Fauci, he elevated Fauci, he never fired him. He said that he did everything right during COVID, claims he saved 100 million lives, you know, with the mRNA vaccine and all this stuff.

‘So I think he will hurt Trump way more than he would hurt any other candidates. And that makes it even a tougher uphill battle,’ he said.