Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, widely regarded as the top contender to challenger former President Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency in 2024, hasn’t formally declared his interest in running for president, but his recent State of the State speech to legislators in Florida capital of Tallahassee, suggests that he will be playing the right-wing tune for his election campaign.
DeSantis has in the past cited his plans for Florida as an example for the rest of the country. Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival is the subtitle of his most recent book, The Courage to Be Free, which elaborately expresses his point of view on this matter.
For sure, along with the Florida success model, the right wing vision will be the main tenet of his campaign. He is trying to appear more and more conservative in his approach.
Under DeSantis, state lawmakers want to extend a contentious ban on discussions on gender identity in the classroom to eighth-graders, who are typically 12 or 13 years old. The ban is currently in place through third grade. DeSantis also approved a law that forbids teachers from introducing specific concepts related to race education in public schools. Along with extending gun rights, limiting diversity initiatives at state-run universities, ending the “medical authoritarianism” of Covid-19 vaccine mandates, the state legislature is led by him in its efforts to pass these measures.
DeSantis is highly unlikely to formally launch a presidential campaign before the culmination of the Florida legislature’s session in May. Donald Trump and Nikki Haley have officially declared their candidacy for the Republican nomination and both of them have already embarked upon high octane campaigns.
DeSantis nonetheless appears to be laying the groundwork for a presidential bid.
Last week, he took part in a prominent donor retreat in Florida before travelling to California to deliver a speech criticising what he believed to be liberal excesses.
Particularly, Trump appeared to be very pumped up during his last month’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland (CPAC). Trump, as expected, is going full-throttle to slander and bully his opponents – particularly Nikki Haley and DeSantis.
Trump seems to be reverting back to his old tactics of excessively bullying his opponents, which he profligately employed 2016 and 2020, to grab the attention of voters through populist sensationalism. In his desperate attempt to win the presidency in 2024, he has taken a belligerent stance towards all of his rivals, both inside and outside the Republican Party.
Whether it is the deep state, Democrats, or the Republican Party establishment, he is getting ready to engage in a direct confrontation with each of them. The Twitter is now stormed by the tweets from the allegedly fake accounts in favour of Trump. Along with praising the former leader, the fake accounts are mocking Trump detractors from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to UN for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, an ambassador who is taking on her former boss.
When it came to Ron DeSantis, the bots aggressively asserted that the Florida governor couldn’t defeat Trump but would make a fantastic running mate. Whoever created the bot network is trying to tip the scales as Republican voters evaluate their candidates for 2024. They are doing this by utilising online manipulation strategies and taking advantage of Twitter’s algorithms to increase their reach.
Trump is also targeting President Biden for his generous financial and military support to Ukraine. Trump says he’d end the war in Ukraine in one day and avert World War III, while DeSantis is keener on waging a culture war than a proxy one to save a foreign democracy.
However, DeSantis also favours the Republican Party’s isolationist tendencies in the global arena. But beyond this, DeSantis is almost clueless about American foreign policy. In his recent book “The Courage to be Free,” DeSantis completely ignores the Ukraine war. But he does criticise the mantra laid out by president George W Bush in his second inaugural address — that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on liberty in other lands.
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