Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed former President Donald Trump this week after being endorsed by dozens of top law enforcement officials in the state of Florida.
During his roughly 30-minute speech, DeSantis accused Trump of being more bark than bite by highlighting Trump’s 2016 campaign promises versus what he accomplished while in office. He made the remarks in Tampa after 60 Florida sheriffs — including 37 who endorsed Trump in 2020 — endorsed DeSantis at The Vault on Thursday.
It wasn’t until the question and answer portion of the event that DeSantis took his strongest shots to date at the former president.
“If you want to know who’s done more to actually implement and deliver on America first policies, the person that’s done that more than anyone else in these United States is right here. Me,” DeSantis said. “That’s just the reality. That’s the reality.”
One supporter told the governor that he supported him for the GOP nomination, but he wondered how DeSantis was going to be able to beat Trump given that the former president attracts such large crowds at rallies.
“I remember in the 2020 election, Biden just stayed in his basement, and it’s like, he wasn’t really doing anything,” DeSantis said. “But you know what the Democrats were doing? They were cleaning our clock in Nevada and Georgia. They were harvesting votes. They were doing all this stuff. Now, we banned ballot harvesting in Florida, and it should be banned. It’s wrong. But I’m going to tell you this: As your candidate, if harvesting is allowed in a state, I’m harvesting. I’m going to get the votes that we need to win. I’m not going to fight with one hand tied behind my back. I’m not going to whine about it. I’m going to look at the battlefield and I’m going to execute a plan to be able to win and to be able to win big.”
DeSantis said that in 2020, Biden received very little support in terms of people who actually voted for him and that a lot of his votes came from people who voted against Trump.
“He energized Democrats,” DeSantis said. “You could have John Kennedy walk through the door right now, and he wouldn’t energize Democrats as much as Donald Trump does. That’s just the reality. What did we do in Florida with these Democrats? We defeated these Democrats. We left the Democratic Party in Florida in a pile of ruins. They’re dead. In fact, if you look, if you go back 2019, 2020, the Democrats had like 300,000 more registrations than we did as Republicans. And partially because of our leadership during COVID, that really started to change. So by the time I got re-elected in November, we had 300,000 more Republicans than Democrats. And we never had more Rs than Ds in Florida history. We did that with me being governor. But here’s the best part. 300,000 advantage. Today, that advantage is 600,000. We’ve added another 300,000 advantage in one year.”
When asked later about what needed to happen for him to be able to overtake Trump as the Republican Party frontrunner, DeSantis responded by saying that in every race he’s ever run, he has never been the frontrunner. He said that he was approaching the primaries by going “contest by contest” and ignoring news media narratives that try to paint the race as a national primary.
“I’ve spent the last six weeks spending a lot of time going to rural counties in Iowa,” he said. “That is not getting you a lot of fanfare. It’s certainly not going to move a national poll. But we’re banking people that are going to go caucus for us when it matters. That’s all that matters. Who shows up in Iowa in mid-January, New Hampshire, South Carolina, all those different places. And I wouldn’t trade places with any candidate for where we are in Iowa. I think we’re going to have a tremendous victory there, and I think it’s going to be something that’s going to totally, totally upend all the conventional wisdom with everything that we do.”
The governor also addressed recent reports about the Trump campaign outraising his campaign during the most recent fundraising quarter by noting that the money was raised in large part due to the indictments against Trump and his mugshot being released. He then said that the entire operation backing him still has more money than any other candidate’s operation when all the committees are factored into the equation.
“It’s all about delivering results,” he concluded. “I’m sick of the fanfare. I’m sick of the entertainment, politics as entertainment. I’m sick of all the distractions and all the hoopla and all this other stuff. Now is the time to focus 100% of our energy on the American people and what we need to do to turn the country around.”
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