Byron Donalds built his campaign for governor of Florida on one idea: Donald Trump picked him.
This week he took most of it down.
The Miami Herald reported on September 22 that Donalds' campaign launched a new website that strips away the prominent references to Trump's endorsement. The website tracking service Visualping counted at least eight Trump references removed from his homepage alone. On his issues page, the item that used to sit at the very top — "Enact the Trump Agenda" — is gone. Trump's name no longer appears on that page at all.
It happened the same week a Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump's approval rating had fallen to 32%, the lowest of his political career.
What the homepage said three weeks ago
We checked the Herald's reporting against the Internet Archive's copies of byrondonalds.com.
On September 2, 2026, the homepage opened with a donate button reading "Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds." The main headline was "TRUMP-ENDORSED Proven Conservative Fighter. BYRON DONALDS." Further down, a banner read "ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP!" above Trump's own words: "RUN, BYRON, RUN!" A button under it said "VIEW TRUMP ENDORSEMENT."
And the homepage's summary of his platform said this, word for word:
Byron Donalds is committed to implementing President Trump's Make America Great Again agenda so that our state and our nation's best days are still ahead.
Today, the headline on the same homepage reads "Fighting to defend the Florida dream." The Trump banner is gone. So is the photo of Donalds and his wife, Erika, posing with Trump, which the Herald says has been moved to a separate endorsements page. Trump's quote survives as one slide in a rotating strip of endorsements, next to Elon Musk, Rick Scott, Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz and others.
The words "Trump-endorsed" do still appear on the homepage in one place: the hidden description in the page's code, written for search engines. Visitors don't see it.
The issues page got the same treatment
The Herald compared screenshots of Donalds' issues page from early September and late September.
Before, the first priority was "Enact the Trump Agenda." Now the first issue is affordability.
Before, the second priority was "Fight Illegal Immigration." Now that fight isn't one of the page's headline items. It shows up as a single phrase — "stop taxpayer handouts to illegal immigration" — tucked under the seventh issue on the list, "Law and Order."
That is a big demotion for a man who joined Trump at Florida's Everglades detention camp in July 2025 and called it "a blueprint for other states." When federal inspectors later found it had held 79 people in metal cages about four feet wide, Donalds called investigating it "busy work".
"Trump-endorsed Byron Donalds," until it wasn't
None of this was a small part of the campaign. It was the campaign.
In February 2025, Trump posted that Donalds would be "a truly Great and Powerful Governor for Florida" and would have his "Complete and Total Endorsement. RUN, BYRON, RUN!" Donalds launched his run days later. The Herald reports that almost all of his campaign messaging after that called him "Trump-endorsed Byron Donalds."
The loyalty went back further. In May 2024, Donalds was one of the Republicans who stood behind Trump as he spoke to reporters outside the courtroom at his Manhattan hush money trial. His new homepage still lists that year on his résumé as "Trump Surrogate."
The pulling away started before the website. When Donalds won the Republican primary on August 18, the Herald reports, he didn't mention Trump once from the stage in Orlando. He did praise former Governor Rick Scott and Governor Ron DeSantis by name.
He dropped the name. He kept the agenda.
Here is the part the new website doesn't change.
That same primary-night speech, Donalds promised Florida a state version of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency. "We are going to DOGE all local governments and all state agencies," he said. "There will be no sacred cows." The name "Trump" came off the stage. Trump's program didn't.
In Congress, Donalds was an original cosponsor of the DOGE Act, a bill to write Trump's executive order shrinking the federal workforce permanently into law.
He voted for Trump's budget bill on final passage, 218 to 214. Florida's own Medicaid director later told state lawmakers it will cut $3.8 billion from Florida's health care system, mostly out of Florida hospitals.
And one month ago, he was still defending Trump on the exact issue his new website now puts first. On August 21, NBC's Kristen Welker asked him whether Trump had broken his promise to bring prices down. Donalds said Trump "did not break that promise." In the same interview, he defended $4 gas as the cost of the Iran war.
Why the timing matters
Trump's slide in the Reuters/Ipsos poll is about cost. Just 17% of Americans approve of how he's handling the cost of living. For the first time, more Republicans disapprove of his handling of it than approve, 51% to 44%. Reuters ties that to the war on Iran Trump launched in February, which has pushed gas and diesel prices sharply higher. Its first six months cost the average household about $1,200.
So Donalds now leads his website with affordability — after voting for the Trump budget bill, after cosponsoring Trump's DOGE Act, and after defending $4 gas on national TV in August as the price of the Iran war.
What his campaign says
Donalds' spokesperson, Gates McGavick, told the Herald the new website "reflects Byron's focus on the issues that matter most to Floridians — affordability, insurance costs, and government transparency." He said Donalds "is proud to have President Trump's endorsement."
If he's proud of it, it's fair to ask why it's no longer on the front page.
"Government transparency" is an interesting choice, too. Donalds has promised Florida the "most transparent" government in America, but he won't say whether he still backs his own bill to let officials meet in secret.
What the record shows
For a year and a half, Byron Donalds campaigned for governor as "Trump-endorsed Byron Donalds," and as recently as September 2 his homepage said he was "committed to implementing President Trump's Make America Great Again agenda." This week, with Trump's approval at a career-low 32%, his campaign cut at least eight Trump references from that homepage and removed "Enact the Trump Agenda" from the top of his issues page. His record is unchanged: he voted for the Trump budget bill that Florida's Medicaid director says cuts $3.8 billion from the state's health care system, cosponsored the bill to make Trump's DOGE cuts permanent, promised on primary night to "DOGE" every state agency, and said a month ago that Trump "did not break" his promise to bring prices down. Floridians vote on November 3.
Source
"Byron Donalds strips Trump references from his campaign website," by Claire Heddles, Miami Herald, September 22, 2026. Homepage wording checked against the Internet Archive's September 2 copy and the live site on September 22, 2026. Photo: Al Diaz / Miami Herald.
