President Trump, campaigning in Florida, labeled an Alaska Senate challenger the “fake” candidate and said he personally ordered legal action over the ballot dispute.
Speaking to reporters at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers on October 23, 2026, Trump took the Alaska U.S. Senate race head-on ahead of a midterm rally. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stood with him as the president framed the contest as a Democrat effort to confuse voters on the ballot.
Fox News reported that Trump was asked about the lawsuit tied to the Alaska ballot controversy and answered without hesitation. He said he had pushed for the legal move himself.
Trump told reporters:
"I'm the one that said, do it,"
He called challenger Daniel J. Sullivan “the fake” candidate and cast him as a Democrat-backed stand-in meant to mislead voters next to incumbent Republican Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan, known as Dan Sullivan. Trump claimed the challenger had never voted before, suddenly jumped into the Senate race, and tried to change his middle initial to “S” while insisting the change had nothing to do with politics.
DeSantis added that Daniel J. Sullivan is funded by liberal donors through ActBlue. Trump called that arrangement “a disgrace.”
The exchange put a national spotlight on a name-similarity fight thousands of miles from Fort Myers. Two men named Sullivan are on the Alaska ballot picture Trump described: the sitting Republican senator and a challenger whose middle initial became part of the dispute. Trump’s account is that the challenger’s push around the letter “S” was not accidental politics.
Sen. Dan Sullivan’s campaign did not treat the episode as a sideshow to ignore. Spokesman Nate Adams answered the legal action in a written statement and pointed Alaskans back to the incumbent’s record.
Adams said:
"We’ll let the DOJ complaint run its course,"
He added:
"Alaskans can tell the difference between a Democrat sideshow and Senator Sullivan’s strong record of delivering for Alaska."
Adams’s line dismissed the challenger controversy as a political stunt while leaving the Justice Department complaint to move on its own timeline. The reporting references a lawsuit and a DOJ complaint around the ballot fight. It does not spell out the docket, the parties, or the full allegations beyond the Trump and campaign characterizations.
Trump’s theory of the race is blunt. Put a little-known Daniel J. Sullivan on the same ballot as Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan, lean on name overlap, and harvest confused votes. That is the charge he aired in Fort Myers. He tied it to a sudden candidacy, a claimed blank voting history, and the middle-initial maneuver he said the challenger tried to wave off as non-political.
DeSantis’s ActBlue point supplied the money angle. Trump’s “disgrace” label supplied the judgment. Together they cast the challenger as a vehicle, not a grassroots surprise.
None of that reporting included an on-record reply from Daniel J. Sullivan in the same account. The claims about his voting history, the initial change, and the funding path stand as Trump, DeSantis, and the Sullivan campaign presented them. The DOJ complaint, per Adams, is the formal track for the legal fight Trump said he ordered.
The setting mattered for the midterm calendar. Trump was not in Anchorage. He was on the tarmac in Fort Myers, with Florida’s governor beside him, turning a local rally prelude into a warning about an Alaska ballot. National readers got the message in plain terms: watch the names, watch the money, and do not assume every “Sullivan” on a Senate line is the senator.
Name games and donor pipelines are old tools. Voters still have to sort them out when the print on the ballot is small and the stakes are a U.S. Senate seat.
