DeSantis says Trump not a danger to democracy and should have gone further while president
Ron DeSantis, performing poorly in the polls, on Monday insisted his main opponent for the GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump, is not a danger to democracy despite the ex-president’s fascistic remarks over the weekend.
“No,” DeSantis told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski when the “Morning Joe” co-host asked “Do you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy?”
“Look,” said the governor, defending the Republican frontrunner he is currently trailing by an average of more than 50 points in the latest polls, “I think Donald Trump, when he was president, I think that he really didn’t take some of the action that he could have constitutionally taken.
“And so I understand there’s a narrative saying he’s going to be much different this next term, but I look back, you know, what didn’t he do?”
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Telegraphing that had he been president, or if he becomes president, he would embrace far-right extremist policies even more than Donald Trump did, DeSantis listed what he suggested were some of Trump’s misses while in the Oval Office.
“You know, he didn’t move forcefully to build the border wall that languished for years,” criticized the Florida governor. DeSantis has spent large amounts of taxpayer money flying migrants north, which has been under federal investigation.
“He didn’t fire people like Anthony Fauci from the COVID task force when many conservatives, including me in Florida, were saying they needed to go a different direction, even gave Fauci an award his last day in office, a lot of the people who he appointed he sent trashed after leaving office, but he could have fired them.”
“He didn’t really take any action to reform the bureaucracy or to curb the administrative state. So I think what is being said would be him acting in ways that actually were not how he acted before he deferred a lot of his presidency to some of these people that he now criticizes.”
Over the weekend Trump expanded his fascistic pronouncements.
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“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said Sunday “about the record numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. without immediate legal status,” the Associated Press reported.
“Speaking in the early-voting state of New Hampshire, Trump, drew on words similar to Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kempf’ as the former U.S. president berated Biden’s team over the flow of migrants. ‘All over the world they’re pouring into our country,’ Trump said.”
Just one day earlier, during “a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Saturday,” Alternet reported, “GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump doubled down on his claim that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and praised authoritarian figures like Russian President Vladimir Putin and ‘highly respected’ Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.”
Presidential historian Jon Meacham, also Monday on MSNBC, had “stressed that 2024 shouldn’t be treated like a ‘conventional’ presidential election, as the U.S. is under threat from a ‘fascistic force.'”
“We will never be able to say we were not warned,” Meacham said, according to Alternet. “There’s no surprise attack here. This is explicit. This is clear…. If you don’t think this is serious, I don’t think you’re even remotely paying attention.”