Governor DeSantis has suspended his presidential campaign and will support President Trump, he announced in a video posted to X on Sunday afternoon. He says the former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, represents a return to the past for the Republican Party. 

“I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign.”

He then announced that he would be supporting his chief tormentor, the former president. Mr. DeSantis said Mr. Trump’s policies and goals are more in line with the current iteration of the Republican Party, and Mrs. Haley represents “the old Republican guard of yesteryear.”

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said. “They watched his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance and they see Democrats using lawfare … to attack him.”

Mrs. Haley’s “warmed-over corporatism” is not the direction the party should take, he warned. “The days of putting Americans last, of kowtowing to large corporations, of caving to woke ideology are over,” he said. 

Beginning with his disastrous campaign launch on X in May of last year, Mr. DeSantis fell rapidly in the polls as GOP voters rallied around the former president when criminal charges against him began to mount. The Florida governor blamed in part Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for his failed campaign, saying the timing of the first criminal indictment of Mr. Trump overshadowed the campaign’s early days. 

His campaign itself became a process story for the national media as staffers garnered headlines for fighting with popular members of Congress and even creating unofficial campaign videos that featured Nazi imagery. Following his 20-point re-election win in Florida in 2022, he was dubbed “DeFuture” by the New York Post and was nearly tied with Mr. Trump in the polls in many early caucus and primary states.