URBANDALE, Iowa — Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) took fresh swipes at former President Donald Trump days before the 2024 Republican primary‘s opening contest in Iowa.

As snow continued to fall on the first-in-the-nation state, DeSantis criticized Trump for not debating and for only speaking to friendly news outlets, which, he complained, had not pushed him to defend his record before next Monday.

“As a leader, you’ve got to take responsibility. Not everything you do is always going to work out. So just acknowledge that and say how you do it differently,” DeSantis told reporters Friday in Urbandale. “Iowans have an opportunity to really make this a race where he’s going to have to engage. … You can’t have a nominee that doesn’t even participate in the process.”

“I had people come up to me in the press with the debate saying, you know, ‘Oh, you didn’t go after Trump that in the debate.’ That is not true,” DeSantis said. “If you watch the debate, I hit him on [Black Lives Matter]. I hit him on not building the wall, the debt, not draining the swamp, [former COVID-19 czar Anthony] Fauci, all those things. But it’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there. When you have a clash, then you guys have to cover it, and it becomes something that people start to talk about.”

DeSantis underscored the importance of his campaign’s ground game as a once-in-a-decade weather event sweeps across Iowa, taking a swipe at Trump for not doing the same.

“We’re not going to rest between now and caucus night,” the governor said. “If you have to trudge through snow to be able to earn the vote, you trudge through snow.”

“Our voters are people that are by and large committed caucusgoers,” he added. “They’ve signed up with us. They’re in it. They’re gonna turn out; we’re confident of that. What it does for the overall turnout? I mean, nobody can forecast what the turnout is going to be.”

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DeSantis repeatedly expressed confidence in his campaign staff and volunteers, some of whom he met inside his Urbandale get-out-the-vote office making phone calls to potential caucusgoers in addition to his outside supporters.

“There’s a machinery that goes with a caucus no matter what but especially now with what the weather’s going to be like,” he said on the front steps. “We have that infrastructure there.”