News
‘Absolute Disaster’: Multiple Devastating Reports Reveal DeSantis in Deep Trouble
Over the past few days multiple news reports paint a picture of GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis in massive trouble, as the January 15, 2024 “first in the nation” Iowa Caucuses quickly approach. But it’s not just the DeSantis campaign that’s appearing to crumble. It’s DeSantis’ legacy.
“Florida voters are starting to turn on Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to new polling from Progress Florida and Florida Watch,” Florida Politics reports Tuesday. The two groups, together known as the Florida Communications and Research Hub, “found Florida voters weary of the presidential candidate’s agenda.” They also “found him underwater 52%-45%. DeSantis’ favorability rating is also in the negative, 50%-45%.”
That’s a big flip from just “a year ago, when DeSantis was re-elected by nearly 20 points, the Hub’s polling shows nothing short of a nose-dive.”
Nationwide, Governor DeSantis’ attempts to beat Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, have turned into a battle for second place against former Trump UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
The latest RealClearPolitics polling average shows Donald Trump in first place by 50 points – not polling at 50%, but beating narrowly-second-placed DeSantis by 50 points. Despite facing 91 felony charges in four separate indictments, Trump’s current polling average among GOP voters is 62.9%. DeSantis comes in at just 12.1%. Haley is just half a percentage point below DeSantis, at 11.6%.
DeSantis’ polling inside his home state and nationwide are just a few of his problems.
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On Monday a watchdog group accused Gov. DeSantis of breaking the law.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis broke campaign finance law by communicating about TV spending decisions with a big-dollar super PAC that is supporting his Republican bid for the White House, a nonpartisan government watchdog group alleged in a complaint filed Monday,” the Associated Press reported.
“The Campaign Legal Center cited recent reporting by The Associated Press and others in the complaint, which was filed with the Federal Election Commission. It alleges that the degree of coordination and communication between DeSantis’ campaign and Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting him, crossed a legal line set in place when the Supreme Court first opened the door over a decade ago to the unlimited raising and spending such groups are allowed to do.”
DeSantis’ alleged coordination with his super PAC isn’t the only crisis facing the organization.
“Internal turmoil is threatening to torpedo Ron DeSantis’s already struggling presidential campaign,” The Hill reported Tuesday, in a roundup of crises hitting the DeSantis operation. “Over the weekend, a Washington Post report detailed chaos within DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down. Hours later, a top strategist left the operation — just four weeks before voting kicks off in Iowa with what might be the most critical contest for the Florida governor.”
“When things go badly in a campaign, the wheels tend to come off,” Republican strategist Alex Conant told The Hill. “There’s a lot of finger-pointing, there’s a lot of blame, and it inevitably spills out into the public and just compounds the problems.”
The Hill adds that The Washington Post’s “story — which laid out a string of recent exits and firings at the super PAC, tensions with the campaign and allegations of ‘a troubled structure’ — ‘read like a post-mortem,’ Conant said.”
Worse, “GOP strategist Doug Heye said it’s not clear whether the reports of super PAC tumult signal the wheels coming off DeSantis’s campaign — or if the wheels actually ‘have never actually been on.'”
“This is an absolute disaster for the DeSantis campaign as we head into the final stretch,” Republican strategist Brian Seitchik told The Hill, referring to the super PAC chaos.
It’s not only GOP strategists that have the knives out for DeSantis’ campaign.
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If you’re a Republican voter debating between DeSantis and Trump, or DeSantis and Haley, a former top Fox News host might sway your vote.
Calling it “a trainwreck,” Tucker Carlson “ripped in to Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign team as the ‘nastiest, stupidest’ political operation he has ever seen,” The Independent reported Tuesday.
“You really get the sense that Ron DeSantis – who I liked as governor – the people who represent him online are the nastiest, the stupidest, and the most zero-sum people I’ve ever seen in my life,” Carlson said, according to The Independent. “And I don’t think that reflects him, but it’s like, this is kind of small ball.”
And back inside Florida, DeSantis is tied to major scandals that have become nationwide news.
DeSantis has strong ties to Bridget Ziegler, the Moms for Liberty co-founder and wife of the Florida state Republican Party chairman. Christian Ziegler was suspended over the weekend by the Party after a woman he and his wife engaged in a three-way sexual relationship with accused him of rape.
Bridget Ziegler stood right behind Gov. DeSantis when he signed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law. She has bragged she helped wrote the legislation. DeSantis placed her on the newly-formed state board overseeing what was once the Disney World special tax zone, which DeSantis eliminated after five decades, in response to the multi-billion dollar company’s mostly quiet opposition to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
“Following in the Moms For Liberty model, [Bridget] Ziegler has been a leading anti-trans activist and ‘critical race theory’ opponent who has said her aim is to bring ‘religious values’ into public schools that she claims are ‘indoctrination centers for the radical left,'” the Florida Center for Government Accountability’s Trident news reported. “’Bridget Ziegler, we should have her in every county in Florida,’ DeSantis said in one speech. ‘We have to do a better job in these school board races.'”
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte on Tuesday opined, “Florida was supposed to be the future of the GOP — now the state party is in shambles.”
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If all this weren’t bad enough for DeSantis, he is being slammed for claiming he did not understand Donald Trump’s repeated remarks over the weekend, in which he claimed immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Those comments “closely reflect those of Adolf Hitler as the German leader argued his case for Nazism,” according to People, and other news outlets.
DeSantis, who studied history at Yale and taught history at a private school, was hit with his own words by the Biden campaign Tuesday.
DeSantis refuses to condemn Trump for echoing Hitler by saying immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of the country’: I don’t know what this means with the blood stuff, I know people are trying to draw historical allusions, I don’t know what he meant pic.twitter.com/4olTXyPefw
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 19, 2023
Watch the video above or at this link.
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Donald Trump’s Friday morning claim Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is “heavily guarded” so his supporters cannot attend his trial was torched by a top CNN anchor. The ex-president, facing 34 felony charges in New York, had been urging his followers to show up and protest on the courthouse steps, but few have.
“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! Getting ready to do my Courthouse presser. Two minutes!” Trump wrote Friday morning on his Truth Social account.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins supplied a different view.
“Again, the courthouse is open the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on trials days, is easily accessible,” she wrote minutes after his post.
READ MORE: ‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
Trump has tried to rile up his followers to come out and make a strong showing.
On Monday Trump urged his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, while complaining that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”
On Wednesday Trump claimed, “The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present. If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”
After detailing several of his false claims about security measures prohibiting his followers from being able to show their support and protest, CNN published a fact-check on Wednesday:
“Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away ‘thousands of people’ from the courthouse during his trial; only a handful of Trump supporters have shown up to demonstrate near the building,” CNN reported.
“And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that ‘for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.’ In reality, the designated protest zone for the trial is at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and, in addition, people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings.”
READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is responding to Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court hearing on Donald Trump’s claim he has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution because he was a U.S. president, and she delivered a strong warning in response.
Trump’s attorney argued before the nation’s highest court that the ex-president could have ordered the assassination of a political rival and not face criminal prosecution unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and then convicted by the Senate.
But even then, Trump attorney John Sauer argued, if assassinating his political rival were done as an “official act,” he would be automatically immune from all prosecution.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, presenting the hypothetical, expressed, “there are some things that are so fundamentally evil that they have to be protected against.”
RELATED: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military, or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” she asked.
“It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act,” Trump attorney Sauer quickly replied.
SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor: “If the president … orders someone to assassinate [a rival], is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”
Trump attorney D. John Sauer: “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act.” pic.twitter.com/RddEEYIUrR
— The Recount (@therecount) April 25, 2024
Sauer later claimed that if a president ordered the U.S. military to wage a coup, he could also be immune from prosecution, again, if it were an “official act.”
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and an expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs, was quick to poke a large hole in that hypothetical.
“If the president suspends the Senate, you can’t prosecute him because it’s not an official act until the Senate impeaches …. Uh oh,” he declared.
RELATED: Justices Slam Trump Lawyer: ‘Why Is It the President Would Not Be Required to Follow the Law?’
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted the Trump team.
“The assassination of political rivals as an official act,” the New York Democrat wrote.
“Understand what the Trump team is arguing for here. Take it seriously and at face value,” she said, issuing a warning: “This is not a game.”
Marc Elias, who has been an attorney to top Democrats and the Democratic National Committee, remarked, “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, a former U.S. Ambassador and White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform under President Barack Obama, boiled it down: “Trump is seeking dictatorial powers.”
Watch the video above or at this link.
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Legal experts appeared somewhat pleased during the first half of the Supreme Court’s historic hearing on Donald Trump’s claim he has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution because he was the President of the United States, as the justice appeared unwilling to accept that claim, but were stunned later when the right-wing justices questioned the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s attorney. Many experts are suggesting the ex-president may have won at least a part of the day, and some are expressing concern about the future of American democracy.
“Former President Trump seems likely to win at least a partial victory from the Supreme Court in his effort to avoid prosecution for his role in Jan. 6,” Axios reports. “A definitive ruling against Trump — a clear rejection of his theory of immunity that would allow his Jan. 6 trial to promptly resume — seemed to be the least likely outcome.”
The most likely outcome “might be for the high court to punt, perhaps kicking the case back to lower courts for more nuanced hearings. That would still be a victory for Trump, who has sought first and foremost to delay a trial in the Jan. 6 case until after Inauguration Day in 2025.”
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the courts and the law, noted: “This did NOT go very well [for Special Counsel] Jack Smith’s team. Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh think Trump’s Jan. 6 prosecution is unconstitutional. Maybe Gorsuch too. Roberts is skeptical of the charges. Barrett is more amenable to Smith but still wants some immunity.”
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Civil rights attorney and Tufts University professor Matthew Segal, responding to Stern’s remarks, commented: “If this is true, and if Trump becomes president again, there is likely no limit to the harm he’d be willing to cause — to the country, and to specific individuals — under the aegis of this immunity.”
Noted foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator David Rothkopf observed: “Feels like the court is leaning toward creating new immunity protections for a president. It’s amazing. We’re watching the Constitution be rewritten in front of our eyes in real time.”
“Frog in boiling water alert,” warned Ian Bassin, a former Associate White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. “Who could have imagined 8 years ago that in the Trump era the Supreme Court would be considering whether a president should be above the law for assassinating opponents or ordering a military coup and that *at least* four justices might agree.”
NYU professor of law Melissa Murray responded to Bassin: “We are normalizing authoritarianism.”
Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, argued before the Supreme Court justices that if Trump had a political rival assassinated, he could only be prosecuted if he had first been impeach by the U.S. House of Representatives then convicted by the U.S. Senate.
During oral arguments Thursday, MSNBC host Chris Hayes commented on social media, “Something that drives me a little insane, I’ll admit, is that Trump’s OWN LAWYERS at his impeachment told the Senators to vote not to convict him BECAUSE he could be prosecuted if it came to that. Now they’re arguing that the only way he could be prosecuted is if they convicted.”
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Attorney and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa warned, “It’s worth highlighting that Trump’s lawyers are setting up another argument for a second Trump presidency: Criminal laws don’t apply to the President unless they specifically say so…this lays the groundwork for saying (in the future) he can’t be impeached for conduct he can’t be prosecuted for.”
But NYU and Harvard professor of law Ryan Goodman shared a different perspective.
“Due to Trump attorney’s concessions in Supreme Court oral argument, there’s now a very clear path for DOJ’s case to go forward. It’d be a travesty for Justices to delay matters further. Justice Amy Coney Barrett got Trump attorney to concede core allegations are private acts.”
Due to Trump attorney’s concessions in Supreme Court oral argument, there’s now a very clear path for DOJ’s case to go forward.
It’d be a travesty for Justices to delay matters further.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett got Trump attorney to concede core allegations are private acts.⬇️ pic.twitter.com/F3qXi47ZT6
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) April 25, 2024
NYU professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert scholar on authoritarians, fascism, and democracy concluded, “Folks, whatever the Court does, having this case heard and the idea of having immunity for a military coup taken seriously by being debated is a big victory in the information war that MAGA and allies wage alongside legal battles. Authoritarians specialize in normalizing extreme ideas and and involves giving them a respected platform.”
The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal offered up a prediction: “Court doesn’t come back till May 9th which will be a decision day. But I think they won’t decide *this* case until July 3rd for max delay. And that decision will be 5-4 to remand the case back to DC, for additional delay.”
Watch the video above or at this link.
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