Ron DeSantis blasts Biden for being 'out of touch' amid reports that DeSantis and his wife flew on a donor-funded private jet at least 12 times
- Ron DeSantis' campaign blasted Joe Biden as an "out of touch executive" in a fundraising email.
- The email came an hour after The Washington Post reported that the DeSantis' flew on a private jet funded by a wealthy donor at least 12 times.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put out a fundraising email Wednesday accusing President Joe Biden of being an "out of touch executive." The email came one hour after The Washington Post reported that DeSantis and his wife, Casey, flew on a private jet funded by a wealthy donor at least a dozen times.
The report said that Mori Hosseini, a prominent home developer in Florida, lent the DeSantis' his private jet as recently as February.
The Florida governor — who often touts his blue collar bona fides — has a long history of private air travel financed by wealthy and sometimes secret donors.
At a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this month, DeSantis again alluded to his working-class roots. Wearing jeans and cowboy boots, the Florida governor said that he was a "blue collar kid" and noted that his mother was a nurse and his grandfather was a steelworker.
Last month, DeSantis signed a bill that would hide information about his past and future travels from journalists and political opponents.
The bill's signing came days before he formally launched his 2024 campaign in an audio-only Twitter Spaces event hosted by the billionaire Elon Musk.
After a glitchy start riddled with technical difficulties, the Florida governor leaned into his crusade against "woke" ideology and heaped praise on Musk, calling him a "free-speech advocate," and thanking him for shelling out billions to purchase Twitter.
Weeks later, DeSantis signed a bill banning direct-to-consumer car sales in Florida, but left a notable exception for Musk's Tesla and other electric-car companies.
Musk, meanwhile, has publicly expressed support for DeSantis' 2024 presidential bid. He tweeted that former President Donald Trump — the current GOP frontrunner — was too old for a 2024 run and that DeSantis would "easily win" against Biden.
The Florida governor accused Biden in Wednesday's fundraising email of "poor leadership," adding that "each year we've let this persist, we've strayed farther from the core principles we were founded on and watched our federal government ignore the needs of average Americans."
A spokesperson for DeSantis' gubernatorial office referred Insider's questions to the campaign. A spokesperson for the campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.