‘Ron DeSanctimonious’: angry Trump lashes out at Republican rival

Donald Trump has lashed out at other high-profile Republicans after the failure of the predicted "red wave" in the US midterm elections, which has chilled enthusiasm for his promotion of extremist candidates and a possible new run at the White House.

At Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, as Democrats had a better election than expected, the former US president was seen to be in a mood ranging from subdued to exasperated, but later in the week he became angry, attacking fellow Republicans including two popular governors.

On Thursday night, his target was the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, once a close ally but now seemingly an arch-rival for a presidential run in 2024, particularly after DeSantis easily won re-election over his Democratic challenger, Charlie Crist.

In a long diatribe on social media, Trump, astonishingly and seemingly spuriously, claimed to have abused his presidential office by sending in the FBI to stop what he called "vote-stealing" in Florida to swing the 2018 election in DeSantis's favor.

"I was all in for Ron, and he beat [Democratic candidate Andrew] Gillum, but after the race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt election process in Broward county, and Ron was going down 10,000 votes a day, along with now Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the US attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his election from being stolen," Trump wrote.

He also used his new nickname for the governor: "Ron DeSanctimonious".

There is no evidence of tampering with Florida's 2018 election, nor of any federal intervention to stop any supposed irregularities. Trump continues to lie that Joe Biden's victory over him for the White House in 2020 was due to widespread election fraud, a wholly discredited allegation.