Trump claims credit for Ron DeSantis getting elected as Florida's governor

• Former President Donald Trump has claimed credit for Ron DeSantis becoming Florida's governor.
• Trump said he doesn't know if DeSantis plans to run in the 2024 presidential election.

Former President Donald Trump said on Monday that he's "very responsible" for Ron DeSantis being elected governor of Florida in 2019, as attention grows around the possibility of the two facing off for the Republican presidential nomination.

In a phone interview on Newsmax's "The Balance," Trump was asked for his thoughts on DeSantis running for the White House.

"I don't know that he wants to run. I have a good relationship with Ron, I don't know that he wants to run. I haven't seen that. You're telling me something that I've not seen, so we'll see what happens," Trump told the show's host, Eric Bolling.

"But no, I was very responsible for getting him elected," the former president said.

Trump's on-air comments align with his claims in a New Yorker article about DeSantis published on Monday.

"If I didn't endorse him, he wouldn't have won," Trump said of the Florida governor, per the outlet. The former president endorsed DeSantis in 2017 over then-GOP frontrunner Adam Putnam, who had a $15 million campaign war chest.

The New Yorker wrote that Susan Wiles, a political strategist who helped Trump win the 2016 election, had managed DeSantis' gubernatorial campaign, but that the governor broke ties with her after he was elected over a dispute.

Many wealthy donors who supported Trump's 2020 election bid have also started making contributions to a political committee tied to DeSantis, Politico reported Sunday. This was the first time most of them had donated money to a candidate in a Florida state-level election, the outlet wrote.

While Trump told the New Yorker multiple times that his relationship with DeSantis is "very good," the outlet also cited a lawyer close to DeSantis who said things between them are "complicated."

Trump also told the New Yorker that he is "very close to making a decision" on whether he'll run in 2024, while DeSantis has so far refused to publicly state whether he's planning a presidential campaign.

Support for DeSantis appears to be growing: he's won several straw polls asking conservatives who they want in the White House.

In October, Trump said he would beat DeSantis if they both were to run for president. "If I faced him, I'd beat him like I would beat everyone else," he said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.

Rolling Stone reported on June 12 that Trump has been considering announcing a potential presidential bid near Tallahassee — Florida's capital. His choice of location would be to show DeSantis "who the boss is" in the GOP, the outlet reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.

DeSantis' office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.