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‘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
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
