Welcome back! Megyn Kelly has fiery exchange with Ron DeSantis over him still trailing Trump - eight years after THAT debate appearance with Trump

In a moment that had shades of her confrontations in past debates with former President Donald Trump, Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly clashed with Ron DeSantis in Thursday's debate.

Kelly - who made peace with Trump but was unable to convince him to attend the NewsNation debate on her podcast - was once accused by Trump after a 2015 contest of 'bleeding from her wherever.'

Moderating the final debate of 2023, she pointed out to DeSantis early on in the battle pointing out the Florida governor is in third in New Hampshire and South Carolina and losing to Trump in his home state.

'Is it fair to say, as Senator Tim Scott did when he dropped out, that voters are telling you, not no, but not now?'

DeSantis seem perturbed by the question, the polls and the pundits declaring his candidacy prematurely dead.

'So we have a great idea in America that the voters actually make these decisions, not pundits or pollsters,' he said.

He then noted that pollsters got the midterm elections wrong, saying: I’m sick of hearing about these polls because I remember those polls in November of 2022. They said there’s going to be a big red wave. It was going to be monumental. And that crashed and burned.' 

DeSantis pointed out that he won in Florida by double digits where other Republicans failed.

Kelly started by noting how far DeSantis' campaign had fallen from his status as a conservative darling. 

'Governor DeSantis, your campaign and its superPAC have spent the most money, had the most high net worth donors, and had a wave of momentum coming into this race after your big reelection win in Florida,' she said.

'You were seen by many as the candidate most likely to consolidate the non-Trump field.'

'But here we are a month out from the first real votes and you haven’t managed to do it. In fact, Nikki Haley is beating you in New Hampshire and South Carolina now, and closing in on you in Iowa,' Kelly added.

According to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, Trump is now on track to win around 60 percent of the votes in the contest, which begins with the Iowa Caucus on January 24. 

It leaves Ron DeSantis a long way back in second place at 12.6 percent with just 52 days until the votes start to count. 

DeSantis will join former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, ex-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy at the next GOP Wednesday but Trump - as he did with all three previous debates - will skip it.

The Florida governor has recently lost two key cogs in his Never Back Down Super PAC, with chairman Adam Laxalt resigning a week ago and chief executive Kristin Davison among several staffers being fired Saturday.

They've been replaced in both roles by Scott Wagner, according to the New York Times. 

The numbers are the first time in 2023 that Trump has garnered 60 percent of the polling average. 

DeSantis placing second in the polls which such a low total shows how none of the other candidates have been able to lay a glove on the incumbent nominee Trump.

Haley is currently averaging 9.5 percent, Ramaswamy 5.1 percent and Christie 2.9 percent. 

The debate was the first hosted by Kelly since the 2016 debates, where she initially clashed with Trump.  

Trump has launched an astonishingly personal attack on Fox News host Megyn Kelly after she fired 'unfair' questions at him during a televised debate.

The Republican frontrunner said there 'was blood coming out of her... wherever' when she was grilling him on his history of insulting women.  

The remark, in an interview with CNN, is the latest in a series of upsets in what Kelly termed the 'war on women', in which Trump has turned on female targets.

The intervention over Kelly also saw him booted off of the lineup at an influential meeting of conservative activists scheduled for Saturday, after the comments were widely interpreted as a reference to Kelly's menstrual cycle.

In the CNN exchange Trump roundly attacked her, saying: 'I don't have a lot of respect for Megyn Kelly, she came out, reading her little script, trying to be tough and sharp.

'When you meet her you realize she is not very tough or very sharp. She is zippo.'

When Lemon asked him to expand, he said: 'I just don't respect her as a journalist. I have no respect for her, I don't think she's very good. She's highly overrated.

'I got out there they start saying all this stuff... she gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever... you could see she was off-base.'

He concluded: 'She's a lightweight, I couldn't care less about her'. Some commentators online criticized Lemon for not asking Trump to explain himself.