Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was hit with a hail of boos and chants of “You suck!” as he attended WWE’s Saturday Night’s Main Event in Tampa over the Memorial Day weekend.
The former Republican presidential candidate, 46, appeared ringside at the Yuengling Center to wave to the crowd but was not greeted with the warm reception he had evidently been expecting.
Instead, he found himself having to grin and clap along awkwardly as the animosity rained down from local wrestling fans, who made it abundantly clear what they thought of him, a moment captured in a number of videos filmed in the arena and shared on social media.
DeSantis is the second associate of Trump’s to be booed at a WWE event in recent months after Hulk Hogan was greeted with a chorus of jeers when he made a surprise appearance on Monday Night Raw in January.
DeSantis was briefly tipped to beat Donald Trump to the GOP nomination in 2023. He had built up a strong conservative following through his combative leadership of the Sunshine State during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The New York Post even celebrated him as “DeFuture” on a fawning front page.
However, as the primary season got underway, it quickly became clear he was struggling to connect with voters and muster support.
Then, on January 21 last year, two days before the New Hampshire primary, he suspended his campaign as it became obvious he could not compete, reluctantly endorsing Trump, who had spent several months mocking and insulting him, just a week after DeSantis had hit out at Republicans who “kiss the ring.”
Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson told The Independent at the time that DeSantis had proved to have “the opposite of political charisma” and that “the initial idea of Ron DeSantis being a great campaigner was rapidly put to the test and discovered to be a lie.”
DeSantis is now nearing the end of his second term, and his next moves are unclear ahead of his scheduled departure from the governor’s mansion in January 2027.
Meanwhile, the president has wasted no time in backing Florida Rep. Byron Donalds as his preferred candidate for the job.
“He’s completely crashed to the ground at this point and is certainly being treated like a more standard, average governor now,” political science professor Aubrey Jewett of the University of Central Florida told The Guardian of DeSantis recently.
“He’s lost the ability to push things through. He’s lost that luster he had that at one time seemed like he could do no wrong in Republican conservative circles.
“He’s definitely come back down to earth and some of it is his own doing because if you govern with an autocratic style, that doesn’t usually make you a lot of allies.”
That assessment certainly seemed to be borne out at the Yuengling Center on Saturday night.
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