Last week The Washington Examiner ran a story titled “DeSantis feuds with Trump over Florida rally amid search for survivors in Surfside.”

Former President Donald Trump is rejecting pleas from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to postpone a campaign-style rally this weekend some 200 miles from the Miami suburb where an international search-and-rescue mission is excavating bodies from the site of a collapsed seaside condominium.

DeSantis’s office has “made a direct plea” to the former president’s team, calling on it to postpone the Saturday event in Sarasota. One Florida Republican bluntly said Trump and his team need to “read the room.”

“The governor is getting tested here as to how far he’s going to be pushed before he breaks ranks with President Trump. And he has to be very careful because this is Trump country,” the anonymous source told The Examiner. “The base loves the president. But they equally love Ron. It’s a showdown going on right now.”

Trump is very popular in Florida and another anonymous source said that DeSantis is wary of sparking a public feud with Trump.

“He does have to win reelection in 2022,” a former aide to Trump said of DeSantis. “He can’t piss off the president. But at the same time, he’s reading the temperature correctly.”

“The governor supports the president, but something awful just happened in his state,” another anonymous source said.

“We can walk and chew gum at the same time. But right now, there’s a Kumbaya moment. People need this. We need everybody to come together, we need to see that to start healing this country. And we saw a little bit of that today for the first time in five years. Today was the first day that people were like, ‘Maybe there’s hope that our country can come back together again.’ Only for, on Saturday, the former president tearing the Band-Aid off: He’s gonna go for the jugular,” they said.

But notice that all of these sources are anonymous. You have not heard DeSantis or Trump say anything about this supposed rift. That is, until Saturday night at the Sarasota rally when Trump let it be known that the two are fine.

“We mutually agreed. He is working very hard. He is doing a very good job. He should be there,” Trump said to Newsmax before the rally.

“I told him: “You should stay there, this is not that important for you.’ He of all people should be there,” he said.

Wow, sounds like a bitter blood feud, doesn’t it? Trump’s former campaign advisor Sam Nunberg put it best.

“It’s a media creation,” he said. “People are just looking for splits that don’t exist.”

And predictably, the media went nuts last week when DeSantis and Joe Biden were kind to each other as Biden visited the state and offered federal resources to help with the Surfside tragedy.

“President Biden and his administration have been working hand-in-hand with state and local partners in response to the tragedy in Surfside – including with Governor DeSantis and his team,” Michael Gwin, White House rapid response director, said.

“We’re appreciative of the Governor’s warm welcome to Florida on Thursday and we will continue working in close coordination as we ensure state and local officials have everything they need from the federal government,” he said.

What was the governor supposed to do? Have a petty fight with Biden amid a tragedy as he needs federal help for his state?

But the media as tried to create something else about the visit, The Daily Mail reported.

“The visit triggered a string of stories about Biden trying to woo a Trump ally,” it said.

Make no mistake, the media wants these two Republicans to fight each other and create a path for Democrat victory in 2024.