Insiders behind the 2024 Ron DeSantis for president effort are starting to nervously back away from the Florida governor. While DeSantis definitely has a lot of goodwill with the America First movement, that could all be squandered if he runs against his friend and benefactor Donald Trump. Some DeSantis megadonors are now saying that the governor should ride the bench in 2024, and run for president in 2028.
The billionaires supporting DeSantis hate Trump-style populism and America First governance. Their strategy so far has been to pour tons of money into the PAC supporting a 2024 DeSantis run, while whispering sweet nothings in the governor’s ear.
They’ve been trying to convince the Florida governor that he could be the one to take out Trump after Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Rick Santorum, Jim Gilmore, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz all failed in the 2016 Republican primary.
It looks like political folly for DeSantis to take on Trump, given the inability of anyone else to bruise the former president. It could even be political suicide. Some of the people on that list still haven’t fully recovered from the drubbing that Trump handed them. Where’s Scott Walker these days? Remember when the mainstream media said he was the GOP shoo-in in 2016?
But after the recent missteps from DeSantis, and Trump’s widening lead over him in every poll, the donors are getting wary. They don’t want to repeat the same mistake that they made in 2016 when Jeb “Please Clap?!” Bush burned through $130 million of their cash and they got nothing to show for it.
The partisan political application of the law by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has only endeared the American voters to Trump more strongly. Bragg may still indict the former president, which has never happened before in American political history. And all for a nonexistent “crime” that the former president did not commit, and which he didn’t even know about at the time.
That issue is far bigger than any individual running for president, whether they’re a Democrat or a Republican. If the Democrat Party is allowed to take out Donald Trump on false indictment charges, we’re pretty much done as a constitutional republic. We cannot allow the party in power to simply arrest its main political rivals on fake charges. The system can’t work like that.
Suppose the Biden White House and Bragg do manage to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024. The result would likely be Ron DeSantis as the nominee. As soon as DeSantis gets close to Biden or whoever the Democrat nominee is, they’ll just arrest him, too.
DeSantis had a chance to rise above the fray in this, by standing strongly in favor of the rule of law. He didn’t do that. He took cheap shots at President Trump that were dishonest, to say the least.
DeSantis also flip-flopped on his stance on the Ukraine-Russia war. After initially calling it a “border dispute” that has nothing to do with the United States – which he said in writing to Tucker Carlson of Fox News – DeSantis changed his mind. Now he wants Putin indicted as a “war criminal” just like Hillary Clinton and Lindsey Graham and the rest of the neocons.
It’s disappointing, to say the least. DeSantis can still salvage his political career at this point. If he doesn’t run in 2024, he can finish out his term as Florida governor, and then be primed to run unimpeded in 2028. We’re about to find out if DeSantis is capable of resisting the siren song of all that establishment RINO donor cash that’s been flowing his way.
