Jake Tapper tweeted a quote from Alex Leary's Wall Street Journal piece "Trump Says It Would Be a Mistake for DeSantis to Run for the White House in 2024" (Nov 8, 2022)
Trump threatens DeSantis: “If he runs, he runs. If he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.”
Consequently, readers wondered what "very [un]flattering" information Trump may have on DeSantis. Well, Bess Levin related in a Vanity Fair piece that "Donald Trump, Longtime Friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Suggests Ron DeSantis Groomed High School Girls"
Levin wrote:
On Tuesday, [February 7, 2022] the 45th president shared two posts on Truth Social that included the same photo of DeSantis apparently partying with high school girls while he was working at a private school, with the image claiming to show DeSantis “grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.” Adding his own commentary, Trump wrote: “No way?” and “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!”
To elaborate, Trump responded sarcastically to the meme "Here is Ron DeSanctimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher" with "That's not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!
And to Dong-Chan Lee's Truth Social post, "DeSantis was having a "drink" party with his students when he was a high school teacher. Having drinks with underage girls and cuddling with them certainly look pretty gross and ephebophiliaesque.", Trump asked, "No way?"
It's not clear if there's any truth to DeSantis' grooming allegations, but per the New York Times report "Pranks, Parties and Politics: Ron DeSantis’s Year as a Schoolteacher" (Nov. 5, 2022), DeSantis "hung out at parties with seniors" at the Darlington School, a boarding school in Georgia, and "[...] Mr. DeSantis was popular among many students." [Emphasis added]
The Vanity Fair subheading, "As a reminder, the ex-president has literally been described as Epstein’s wingman, and he once called the deceased predator a 'terrific guy' who was 'a lot of fun to be with.'", inferred that Trump has some audacity to imply that DeSantis had an affair with (at least) one of his prep school students, which reminded us of a previous post where we recapped Karen Ruiz's Daily Mail post "Donald Trump was allegedly recorded having a threesome with a teenage girl and a porn star in a Mafia-run Times Square brothel in the 80s, book claims" (October 18, 2019).
In the post, Ruiz wrote that, per the book All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, Donald Trump was (allegedly) recorded having a threesome with a teenage girl and a porn star in a Mafia-run Times Square brothel in the 80s!