Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce another presidential campaign on Tuesday night.
Last week, Trump said he would make a special announcement from Mar-a-Lago at 9 pm on Tuesday night. With numerous reports in recent weeks about Trump planning to launch a third presidential campaign in the middle of November, all signs indicate that Trump will announce it on Tuesday night.
Trump has also zeroed in on Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of the biggest Republican winners in last week’s general election. In recent days, Trump has gone on the attack against DeSantis, calling him “Governor Ron DeSanctimonious” and painting him as an average Republican governor with great public relations, who didn’t have to close up his state, but did, unlike other Republican governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of sunshine, where people from badly run states up North would go no matter who the governor was, just like I did!”
The former president offered his take on the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election, insisting he made DeSantis.
“Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017—he was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam, who was loaded up with cash and great poll numbers. Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would endorse him, he could win. I didn’t know Adam so I said, ‘Let’s give it a shot, Ron.’ When I endorsed him, it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off. Years later, they were the exact words that Adam Putnam used in describing Ron’s endorsement. He said, ‘I went from having it made, with no competition, to immediately getting absolutely clobbered after your endorsement.’ I then got Ron by the ‘star’ of the Democrat Party, Andrew Gillum (who was later revealed to be a ‘crackhead’), by having two massive Rallies with tens of thousands of people at each one. I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart. I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his election from being stolen,” Trump insisted. There has been no evidence presented about attempts to steal the 2018 gubernatorial race.
“And now, Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, ‘I’m only focused on the governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.’ Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer,” Trump continued. “This is just like 2015 and 2016, a media assault (collusion!), when Fox News fought me to the end until I won, and then they couldn’t have been nicer or more supportive. The Wall Street Journal loved Low Energy Jeb Bush, and a succession of other people as they rapidly disappeared from sight, finally falling in line with me after I easily knocked them out, one by one. We’re in exactly the same position now. They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately, we will win. Put America First and make America great again!”
Trump has been drawing increased criticism in recent days from some Republicans who blame him in large part for the GOP’s failure to flip the U.S. Senate, make major gains in the U.S. House even as they are still expected to take control of that chamber and losing gubernatorial races.
Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Mary., a possible presidential candidate in 2024, took a swipe at Trump when he appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“It’s basically the third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race, and it’s like, three strikes, you’re out,” Hogan told CNN. “This should have been a huge red wave. It should have been one of the biggest red waves we’ve ever had.
“I think commonsense conservatives that focused on talking about issues people cared about, like the economy and crime and education, they did win,” Hogan added. “But people who tried to relitigate the 2020 election and focused on conspiracy theories … they were all almost universally rejected.”
Former U.S. Sec. of State Mike Pompeo, who served in Trump’s Cabinet, also took a veiled shot at his old boss after the elections.
“Conservatives are elected when we deliver. Not when we just rail on social media. That’s how we can win. We fight for families and a strong America,” Pompeo insisted.
In the meantime, YouGov released a poll showing 42 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaners would prefer DeSantis be their candidate in 2024, while 35 percent prefer Trump over the Florida governor, while 10 percent don’t want to see either of them as the candidate.
“That’s a reversal from nearly a month ago, when — according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll of U.S. adults — just 35 percent preferred DeSantis and 45 percent said they preferred Trump. People who say they strongly identify as Republicans are more likely to prefer Trump yet are still nearly evenly divided. Independents who lean toward the Republican Party, on the other hand, are more than twice as likely to prefer DeSantis to Trump,” noted YouGov.
The sample of 413 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents was part of a survey of 1,500 Americans taken between Nov. 9 through Nov. 11 with a margin of error of +/- 3 percent.
