Eyeing a possible White House bid, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declined on Monday to weigh in on one of the most divisive issues in the GOP: Could then-Vice President Mike Pence have “overturned” the 2020 presidential election?
Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that Pence could have changed the outcome of the election by upending the congressional certification of the results, overturning President Joe Biden's win. On Friday, Pence rebutted his former boss, saying Trump was "wrong" to suggest he had the authority to change the outcome of the election.
Asked Monday with whom he sides, DeSantis wouldn’t say.
“I’m not. I … ,” DeSantis told reporters at an immigration-related media event at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami before he cut himself off.
Pressed by a reporter, DeSantis changed the subject to say he had a “great working relationship” with the Trump administration during the two years his administration overlapped with it. And he then criticized the Biden White House for obstructing his agenda.
Trump remains the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination if he runs again in 2024. DeSantis is a distant second, according to early primary polls, which show him leading the pack if Trump doesn't run. Pence, who is also laying the groundwork for a presidential run, comes in third place in a crowded field that also includes Trump allies like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Although talk of a DeSantis-Trump feud has ebbed and flowed for months, both men say they have a good relationship — underscored by DeSantis’ reticence in crossing Trump on the issue of Pence's power to interfere in the Jan. 6, 2021, tally. Polls indicate that a significant proportion of GOP primary voters nationwide believe the election was stolen — despite numerous audits, investigations and court cases that found that no widespread fraud occurred to prevent Trump's victory (Caputo 1).
For months, former President Donald J. Trump has been grumbling quietly to friends and visitors to his Palm Beach mansion about a rival Republican power center in another Florida mansion, some 400 miles to the north.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man Mr. Trump believes he put on the map, has been acting far less like an acolyte and more like a future competitor, Mr. Trump complains. With his stock rising fast in the party, the governor has conspicuously refrained from saying he would stand aside if Mr. Trump runs for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
“The magic words,” Trump has said to several associates and advisers.
That long-stewing resentment burst into public view recently in a dispute over a seemingly unrelated topic: Covid policies. After Mr. DeSantis refused to reveal his full Covid vaccination history, the former president publicly acknowledged he had received a booster. Last week [January 2022], he seemed to swipe at Mr. DeSantis by blasting as “gutless” politicians who dodge the question out of fear of blowback from vaccine skeptics.
Mr. DeSantis shot back on Friday, criticizing Mr. Trump’s early handling of the pandemic and saying he regretted not being more vocal in his complaints.
The back and forth exposed how far Republicans have shifted to the right on coronavirus politics. The doubts Mr. Trump amplified about public health expertise have only spiraled since he left office. Now his defense of the vaccines — even if often subdued and almost always with the caveat in the same breath that he opposes mandates — has put him uncharacteristically out of step with the hard-line elements of his party’s base and provided an opening for a rival.
But that it was Mr. DeSantis — a once-loyal member of the Trump court — wielding the knife made the tension about much more.
At its core, the dispute amounts to a stand-in for the broader challenge confronting Republicans at the outset of midterm elections. They are led by a defeated former president who demands total fealty, brooks no criticism and is determined to sniff out, and then snuff out, any threat to his control of the party.
That includes the 43-year-old DeSantis, who has told friends he believes Mr. Trump’s expectation that he bend the knee is asking too much. That refusal has set up a generational clash and a test of loyalty in the de facto capital of today’s G.O.P., one watched by Republicans elsewhere who’ve ridden to power on Mr. Trump’s coattails.
…
… Mr. Trump has made no secret of his preparations for a third run for the White House. And while Mr. DeSantis, who is up for re-election this year, has not declared his plans, he is widely believed to be eyeing the presidency.
Mr. Trump and his aides are mindful of Republicans’ increasingly public fatigue with the drama that trails Mr. Trump. The former president’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election — which Mr. DeSantis has not challenged — and his role in the events leading to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol have some Republicans looking for a fresh start.
Mr. DeSantis is often the first name Republicans cite as a possible Trump-style contender not named Trump.
“DeSantis would be a formidable 2024 candidate in the Trump lane should Trump not run,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. “He’s Trump but a little smarter, more disciplined and brusque without being too brusque.”
…
Mr. DeSantis has $70 million in the bank for his re-election, a war chest he stocked with help from the Republican rank-and-file and donor class, alike. He has raised his profile in the same spaces Mr. Trump once dominated. The governor is ubiquitous on Fox News, where he is routinely met with the sort of softballs that once arced toward Mr. Trump. And he frequently mixes with the well-tanned Republican donor community near the former president’s winter home in South Florida.
It was not always this way.
Mr. DeSantis was a little-known Florida congressman in 2017, when Mr. Trump, who was then the president, spotted him on television and took keen interest. Mr. DeSantis, an Ivy League-educated military veteran and smooth-talking defender of the new president, was exactly what Mr. Trump liked in a politician.
It wasn’t long before Mr. Trump blessed Mr. DeSantis’s bid for governor and sent in staff to help him, lifting the lawmaker to a victory over a better-known rival for the party’s nomination.
Mr. DeSantis survived the general election and has often governed in a style that mirrors his patron, slashing at the left and scrapping with the news media. But that alone doesn’t placate Mr. Trump. As with other Republicans he has endorsed, the former president appears to take a kind of ownership interest in Mr. DeSantis — and to believe that he is owed dividends and deference.
“Look, I helped Ron DeSantis at a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” Mr. Trump said in an interview for a forthcoming book, “Insurgency,” on the rightward shift of the Republican Party, by the New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters. Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. DeSantis “didn’t have a chance” of winning without his help.
The former president’s expectation of deference from Mr. DeSantis is a reminder to other Republicans that a Trump endorsement comes with a price …
At times, Mr. Trump has sought to kindle his relationship with Mr. DeSantis. He has suggested the governor would be a strong choice for vice president. Similar courtship has helped win deference from other potential rivals. But Mr. DeSantis has not relented (Martin and Haberman 1-4).
Longtime Donald Trump advisor Roger Stone is dumping on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as an Ivy League 'fat boy' – in the latest sign of split between DeSantis and Trump.
Stone, who has known Trump for decades and advised him informally during the 2016 campaign – then got a presidential pardon following a long legal saga amid the Russia probe – tore into DeSantis following a report the former president considers the potential rival 'dull.'
'Trump sometimes President Donald Trump hits it right on the nose. Ron DeSantis Yale Harvard fat boy can’t get out of his own way,' he wrote.
'Not smart. Not honest and not going to be president,' Stone wrote on social media.
He called DeSantis, 43: 'An unknown congressman with a bad haircut and an ill-fitting suit until Donald Trump made him governor' ...
…
The attack came days after Trump addressed a rally in Arizona and stoked conspiracy theories about Jan. 6th – as he positions for a potential run to reclaim the White House in 2024.
…
Trump is said to have branded DeSantis a 'dull' charisma free-zone as rumors swirl the former president is angry the popular Florida governor hasn't said that he won't challenge Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Sources close to the former president who have recently talked to him about DeSantis said Trump has grown increasingly irked by DeSantis in recent months, with Trump beginning to voice his frustrations to those in his inner circle.
'In the context of the 2024 election, he usually gives DeSantis a pop in the nose in the middle of that type of conversation,' said a source who recently spoke to Trump about DeSantis.
'He says DeSantis has no personal charisma and has a dull personality,' the source told Axios.
…
The root of Trump's ire towards DeSantis appears to stem from the fact that the Florida governor 'won't say he won't run [in 2024]. ... The others have stated pretty clearly they won't challenge him,' the source went on to say.
…
When Trump was president, DeSantis was a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's private club in Palm Beach. The two would often dine together when Trump was in town (Earle and McNulty 1-2).
But DeSantis has … been careful to avoid direct confrontation with Trump, especially given the fact that he’s facing reelection this year and needs to maintain the support of the former president’s loyal voter base. In the interview with “Ruthless,” DeSantis dismissed the notion that his relationship with Trump had soured, blaming the media for fueling such rumors.
“You cannot fall for the bait,” he said. “You know what they’re trying to do, so just don’t take it. Just keep on keeping on. We need everybody united for a big red wave in 2022. We’ve got to fight the left, and not only fight, but beat the left. And that’s what we’re doing in Florida.”
…
… DeSantis’s appeal among Republicans — including Trump’s base — is clear. Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based GOP strategist and former congressional candidate, said the governor has been successful in taking aspects of Trump’s political brand and making them his own, especially amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“What he’s done is he’s taken Donald Trump’s America First playbook and crafted it as a Florida First playbook,” O’Connell said.
“If you had told me that Ron DeSantis would display more political courage than Greg Abbott, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he added, referring to the Republican governor of Texas. “The idea that DeSantis gave all the other Republicans a backbone and cover to do what’s best for their states is why conservatives are rewarding him now.”
One Republican consultant with ties to Florida said that part of the interest in DeSantis as a future presidential candidate stems from the perception among many in the party that the Florida governor is effectively “Trump without the baggage.”
“He’s a little more polished, I think. He’s got the Harvard credentials, he served in the military, he’s the governor of the third largest state, but he can still speak the language of the MAGA crowd,” the consultant said. “With Trump, there’s still a lot of drama, so I think it probably worries him that there’s this other guy who’s getting a lot of attention” (Greenwood 1).
Trump holds sizable margins in pretty much every poll you can find, but some of the numbers are tightenng. Last week, the polling firm Echelon Insights published a raft of data on the Florida governor. It found that Trump’s lead over DeSantis among G.O.P. voters, which, according to its own poll, was 62 percent to 22 percent of respondents in October, had shrunk to 57 percent to 32 percent as of late January. Perhaps the most compelling bit of information Echelon found was that while 54 percent of Republicans thought “Trump was a great president and should remain the leader of the Republican Party,” 22 percent said Trump “was a great president but it is time for the Republican Party to find a new leader” and 18 percent said Trump “was not a great president and the Republican Party would be better off without his influence.” Which means that 40 percent of G.O.P. voters are at least open to the possibility of someone new.
...
DeSantis’s recent rise to national prominence has come from his handling of the pandemic — he has become the loudest anti-lockdown voice in the national conversation and can point to his repeated refusal to shut down his state. This might be a popular stance in 2022, but it’s hard to imagine how it will play in two years. If Covid is shutting down schools and businesses in two years, we will most likely be looking at a vastly different country. If we have returned to some semblance of normalcy, it’s quite possible that nobody will really care how DeSantis handled the pandemic (Kang 1-2).
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis chastised a group of students wearing face masks on Wednesday, saying, “Honestly, it’s not doing anything and we’ve got to stop with this Covid theater.”
“How much of a [expletive] do you have to be to yell at a bunch of high school students who are just trying to be safe?” Seth Meyers said. “They’re actually doing the right thing and you’re scolding them for it; you’re like an old man who sees a bunch of innocent teens walking by and screams, ‘Hey, you kids get on my lawn!’”
“Also, what the hell is Covid theater? Those plays where all the actors have to stand six feet apart? [imitating theatergoer] ‘I just saw the Covid theater production of “Les Mis” — the stage was the size of a football field!’” — SETH MEYERS (Bendix 1)
Florida feels like a state running a fever, its very identity changing at a frenetic pace.
Once the biggest traditional presidential battleground, it has suddenly turned into a laboratory of possibility for the political right.
Discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity prohibited in early elementary school. Math textbooks rejected en masse for what the state called “indoctrination.” Schools and employers limited in what they can teach about racism and other aspects of history. Tenured professors in public universities subjected to new reviews. Abortions banned after 15 weeks. The creation of law enforcement office to investigate election crimes. A congressional map redrawn to give Republicans an even bigger advantage.
And, perhaps most stunning of all, Disney, long an untouchable corporate giant, stripped of the ability to govern itself for the first time in more than half a century, in retaliation for the company’s opposition to the crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. conversations with young schoolchildren.
“It does have this feeling of, ‘Oh, what the hell just happened?’” said Kristen Arnett, a novelist and Orlando native who now lives in Miami. “It’s overwhelming.”
Florida has transformed over the past two years as Gov. Ron DeSantis has increased and flexed his power to remarkable effect, embracing policies that once seemed unthinkable. That has made the Republican governor a favorite of the party’s Fox News-viewing base and turned him into a possible presidential contender (Maxxei 1-2).
Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed on Friday [April 30, 2022] that he would make Florida a so-called constitutional carry state, which would allow people to publicly carry firearms without permits.
"The legislature will get it done," DeSantis said during a news conference in north Florida. "I can't tell you if it's going to be next week or six months, but I can tell you that before I am done as governor, we will have a signature on that."
…
For DeSantis, successfully ushering a constitutional carry measure into law would be another conservative victory as he builds a resume that could appeal to Republican primary voters if he decides to run for president. …
…
Responding to DeSantis' announcement on Twitter, US Rep. Charlie Crist, ... running for governor as a Democrat, said, "The last thing Florida needs during a gun violence epidemic is a governor who wants dangerous people carrying guns on the street without so much as a background check."
…
Though DeSantis has voiced support for constitutional carry in the past, Friday's declaration was his most vocal assurance to gun rights groups that he intends to make it a priority. If it's approved, Florida would become the second-largest state to allow permitless concealed carry of guns. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot signed a bill last year that allows people to carry guns most places without licenses or safety training.
A permit is not required to carry a handgun in 23 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (Contorno 1-2).
Works cited:
Bendix, Trish. “Seth Meyers Roasts Ron DeSantis for Berating Teens.” New York Times, March 4, 2-22. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/arts/television/ron-desantis-kids.html
Caputo, Marc. “DeSantis Refuses To Take Sides in Trump-Pence Clash as 2024 Speculation Grows.” NBC News, updated February 8, 2022. Net. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/desantis-refuses-take-sides-trump-pence-clash-2024-speculation-grows-rcna15185
Contorno, Steve. “DeSantis Vows Florida Will Allow People To Carry Firearms without Permits 'Before I Am Done as Governor'.” CNN, April 29, 2022. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/29/politics/desantis-concealed-firearms/index.html
Earle, Goeff and McNulty, Matt. “'Ron's a Yale Harvard Fat Boy, Not Honest and Not Going To Be President': Roger Stone Sides with Trump in Rift with De Santis.” Daily Mail UK, updated January 18, 2022. Net. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10412149/Roger-Stone-calls-DeSantis-Yale-Harvard-Fat-Boy.html
Greenwood, Max. “Trump-DeSantis Tensions Ratchet Up.” The Hill, January 18, 2022. Net. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/590071-trump-desantis-tensions-ratchet-up/
Kang, Jay Caspian. “Does Ron DeSantis Really Have a Shot against Trump?” New York Times, February 3, 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opinion/desantis-trump-republicans.html
Martin, Jonathan and Haberman, Maggie. “Who Is King of Florida? Tensions Rise between Trump and a Former Acolyte.” New York Times, January 16, 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/us/politics/trump-desantis.html
Mazzei, Patricia. “How DeSantis Transformed Florida’s Political Identity.” New York Times, April 28, 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/us/politics/ron-desantis-florida-politics.html
No comments:
Post a Comment