Jeff Timmer of The Lincoln Project was reacting to the 2024 hopeful saying he would be in favor of axing four federal agencies if elected president.
DeSantis is the physical and spiritual embodiment of the worst aspects of Florida.
I live in Democrat majority Central Florida. Last week I had reason to drive out to the Gulf Coast, through very Republican areas.
I spotted more Trump 2024 banners and flags than I cared to count, but only 1 DeSantis sign.
DeSantis can’t even drum up support in his home state.
The worst candidate…SO FAR!
Over time it seems like his extremist lunacy is a coordinated attempt at making Pence look like a moderate and acceptable candidate in comparison. As if they are trying to pull a Biden with Pence, even though Pence is as complicit in everything Trump did as Trump himself.
How can anyone who lived through Trump actually believe this? DeSantis isn’t some kind of psy-op to make Pence look good by comparison. That’s ridiculous.
Given how Republicans vote these days, DeSantis has a very real chance of winning, and you’d do well not to write him off like that. That’s how we ended up with Trump in the first place.
Ron DeSantis is Scott Walker with better hair.
DeSantis is trying to out-Trump Trump by proposing increasingly insane policies, but he’s getting almost zero movement in the polls, even when Trump was indicted for stealing nuclear secrets. Trump may be a carnival barker, but he’s a damn good one. He connects to his base on an emotional level first, then steers them wherever he feels like going on a given day. DeSantis lacks the charisma to pull off anything similar.
The road to DeSantis becoming the candidate is for Trump to get convicted and disqualified from running. Barring that, he doesn’t seem to have a chance.
Convicted felons can still run for office, even from prison.
Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs was arrested in 1918 for publicly speaking out against US involvement in WWI. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “sedition”. He ran for US President in 1920 despite being in jail - he wasn’t allowed to travel or give speeches, but he was allowed to make one statement to newspapers every week.
Despite being in jail, he still got 3.4% of the popular vote. Warren G. Harding won the election and pardoned Debs in December 1921.
The statute criminalizing the mishandling of classified documents includes in its punishment a bar to running for federal office. If Trump is convicted in the documents case, the law will forbid him from running for president. One caveat: to my knowledge the statute has not been tested in the courts on constitutional grounds, so the Roberts Court will no doubt take the case.
