Florida's far-right Governor Ron DeSantis has dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.
“It's clear that the vast majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted to X. It is a repackaging of the warmed-up, excessive corporatism that Nikki Haley represents. ”
DeSantis withdrew from the race just days before the New Hampshire primary, after finishing second in the Iowa caucuses but losing by a wide margin to Donald Trump, resulting in a disappointing result. Ta. In New Hampshire, her numbers were far behind former South Carolina Gov. Haley and Trump.
This retreat was the culmination of a long and painful decline.
As of spring 2023, the former Navy lawyer and right-wing lawmaker is blocking Trump's nomination for a third term, largely because he sought to offer tough Trumpist policies without much fuss. He was widely seen as the most likely Republican.
In November 2022, DeSantis won a second term in Tallahassee, defeating Democrat Charlie Crist. In his victory speech he exclaimed: “We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected parental rights. We have respected taxpayers and we have embraced “woke” ideology. I refuse. ”
Citing Winston Churchill, a near-mythical figure on the American right, he continued: “We are fighting woke people in Congress. We are fighting woke people in our schools. We are fighting woke people in corporations. We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is woke. It’s a place where people die.”
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But despite formidable fundraising, a strong-looking electoral structure, strong polling, and a long lead-up to his wife, Casey DeSantis, the Republican Party's rising star, things didn't get off to a good start. There were hardly any.
DeSantis' hard-right policies have been challenged by his choice to confront Disney, a powerful employer in Florida, over its opposition to his “no gay” policy on LGBTQ+ issues in schools. I fell into it. The subject continued to campaign, sparking a series of stories, scandals, and lawsuits surrounding the banning of books from school libraries.
A Twitter Spaces session with Elon Musk that launched the campaign in May ended in a farce as the platform glitched and buckled. “There were so many people that the servers were melting, which is a good sign,” event organizer and donor David Sachs claimed. Few observers agreed.
In the months that followed on the campaign trail, the governor appeared stiff and awkward.For campaigns concentrated The resulting series of derisive memes and threads on social media and the influencers that lurk there could not have been in the plan.
The summer debacle surrounding bizarre campaign videos posted on social media featuring far-right, white supremacists, Nazis, Nazis, and more is also unlikely. probably homosexual image. There were subsequent layoffs, but the campaign's image suffered an even bigger blow when it was reported that it had fundraising problems.
There has been a scandal surrounding attempts to change history teaching in state schools regarding the place of slavery in Florida's past. There have also been attempts to undermine the Democratic Party on immigration issues, such as by sending illegal immigrants by bus or plane into Democratic-run states. This policy eventually reached the courts.
As the gap with Trump widened and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley steadily advanced in the race, DeSantis looked for ways to fight back.
In November, he took the unexpected step of debating a Democrat other than Joe Biden. The Fox News-sponsored contest with California Governor Gavin Newsom was little more than a sideshow.Brandishing a map showing the prevalence of “human feces” on the streets of San Francisco, Mr. DeSantis only succeeded in distributing more “feces maps” meme.
DeSantis and Haley kept their gloves on as the first vote approached, but even Trump's lie that the 2020 election was stolen proved difficult to simply repudiate. He has stepped up his attacks on Trump. In Iowa, DeSantis won major candidates from the governor, Kim Reynolds and evangelical leaders. But apart from Trump, who is the dominant force in this field, only Haley has improved in the polls. I was wearing lifts in my shoes..
DeSantis again shared Churchill's words as he closed out his bid. “Success is not final and failure is not fatal. What matters is the courage to continue,” he posted on X.
Two hours before his planned event in New Hampshire, The Farm Bar and Grill was empty of DeSantis camp and fans. One staff member said he learned from news reports that Mr. DeSantis would not be coming, and said he had not yet made a down payment for the space.
“No, I'm going to press charges against him now.”
