Former President Donald Trump took aim at Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday after the governor addressed reports that progressive Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is intending to charge the former president. In his comments, DeSantis slammed the George Soros-funded D.A. for “weaponizing” the justice system, while also quipping about the alleged “hush money” Trump paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

The back and forth comes as political tensions have risen across the country after Trump claimed over the weekend that he was going to be “arrested on Tuesday” over an alleged $130,000 payment made to Daniels during the 2016 presidential election. A spokesperson for Trump later said that the former president has been given “no notification” on any specifics about the D.A.’s plans.

“Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!),” Trump wrote on social media. “I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!”

Trump included a screenshot from a leftist organization that wrote a hit piece on DeSantis which Trump previously used to promote baseless claims that DeSantis had groomed underage girls with alcohol. DeSantis responded by saying he faces “defamatory stuff every single day” and that he chooses to spend his time “delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” not “trying to smear other Republicans.”

Trump deleted his previous swing at DeSantis and replaced with a post that goes even further — pic.twitter.com/lKJlp76jg4

— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) March 20, 2023

Trump’s comments followed a DeSantis press conference Monday in which the governor partly defended the former president when a reporter asked him about the situation.

“I do know this, the Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor. And so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety,” DeSantis said. “He has downgraded over 50% of the felonies to misdemeanors, he says he doesn’t want to even have jail time for the vast, vast majority of crimes. And what we’ve seen in Manhattan is we’ve seen the crime rate go up, and we’ve seen citizens become less safe.”

DeSantis said Bragg was “weaponizing” the justice system by choosing to pursue the case from several years ago while “ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction.”

“And I think that that’s fundamentally wrong,” DeSantis said. “I also think it’s important to point out when you’re talking about these Soros-funded prosecutors, yes, they may do a high profile politicized prosecution. And that’s bad.”

DeSantis, who has been increasingly under fire from the former president as he weighs entering the 2024 presidential race, and was recently targeted by a Trump-supporting super PAC with an ethics complaint that sought to remove DeSantis from office, then took an apparent swipe at Trump, remarking, “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair, I can’t speak to that.”

“The real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans and all these different jurisdictions that they get victimized every day because of the reckless political agenda that the Soros DAs bring to their job,” DeSantis said. “They ignore crime, and they empower criminals. And that hurts people, hurts a lot of people every single day. These Soros district attorneys are a menace to society. And I’m just glad that I’m the only governor in the country that’s actually removed one from office during my tenure.”

“We are not involved in this, won’t be involved in this. I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros DA, okay. He’s trying to do a political spectacle. He’s trying to virtue signal for his base. I’ve got real issues I got to deal with here in the state of Florida, we’re obviously shutting down CBDC, which is important,” DeSantis concluded. “We’ve got so many things pending in front of the legislature. I’ve got to spend my time on issues that actually matter to people. I can’t spend my time worrying about things or things of that nature. So, we’re not going to be involved in it in any way. I’m fighting for Floridians and I’m fighting back against Biden. That’s what I do every single day.”

‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

DeSantis comes out swinging against the “weaponized” Soros DA pursuing politically-motivated charges against Trump. pic.twitter.com/BdpQmOY5JE

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) March 20, 2023

According to Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, sources close to DeSantis confirmed that the governor “will not aid Bragg if he indicts Trump,” and stressed that the governor “believes this is an unprecedented, politically motivated prosecution of a former president.”

DeSantis’ comments followed a similar denunciation of Bragg by Mike Pence, another potential 2024 presidential candidate.

“I’m taken aback at the idea of indicting a former President of the United States, at a time when there’s a crime wave in New York City, that — the fact that the Manhattan DA thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority, I think is, just tells you everything you need to know about the radical Left in this country,” Pence told ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

Crime rates across the U.S. have steadily risen since the start of the 2020s, in stark contrast to the steady decline seen since the 1990s. Former federal prosecutor Tom Hogan sat down with PragerU to break down four policy changes that could rapidly reverse that trend.

Target the “power few” Go after the drug dealers and gun toting felons Unite cops and prosecutors Keep the bad actors in jail

“None of these solutions are theoretical: they’re street tested and backed by rigorous studies,” Hogan said. “They’re constitutional, and cost effective. While each one will reduce crime on its own, taken together, they can transform a city, not in decades, but within a year or two.”

Hogan first notes that violence follows predictable patterns — it usually takes place in a handful of “crime hot spots,” disproportionately on nights and weekends and during the summer. Furthermore, a very small share of offenders commit the majority of violent crimes.

“In any given city, just 5% of criminals are responsible for 50% of all violent crimes,” Hogan said. “I want to make this abundantly clear: it’s not 5% of the total population of the city … it’s 5% of the criminals.”

By focusing on these “hot spots” and getting a relative handful of serial offenders off the streets, police can have an outsized impact on violent crime.

Similarly, drug dealers and felons with illegally acquired firearms are valuable targets — not only are they career criminals themselves, but they’re also intimately connected to criminal networks that smuggle illicit goods across the country and have witnessed far more crimes than they have perpetrated. When faced with harsh sentences, they will often flip and provide valuable information on other cases in exchange for leniency.

Hogan also stresses the need for police and prosecutors to collaborate throughout the process to avoid legal slip ups or sloppy presentation of evidence. Hogan bemoans the current state of affairs, where police departments and prosecutors are often at each other’s throats, arguing that poor cooperation only helps criminals.

📱 CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP

Finally, Hogan stresses the need for longer sentencing, citing two studies by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which found that sentences in excess of five years were correlated with lower rates of recidivism.

While the intuitive understanding that the threat of longer sentences disincentivize crime is applicable, Hogan also cites the age-crime curve, a widely observed statistical phenomenon that shows that criminal aggression in males peaks in late adolescence.

“Most violent criminals commit the majority of their crimes from their late teens into their 20s,” Hogan noted.

This is the age range where testosterone levels are at their highest — testosterone is correlated with aggression and impulsive behavior. The prefrontal cortex, which handles complex reasoning and long term decision making, does not fully develop until around age 25, which, coincidentally, is when the likelihood that a given male will violently offend begins to drop precipitously.

“Prison sentences of over five years simply take these violent criminals out of circulation when they’re at their most dangerous.”

WATCH: