It is exceedingly rare for an elected official to be able to say that he changed the course of history. Governor Ron DeSantis is one of them.
He stood against the entire world during COVID-19 by keeping Florida free. His courage proved to other leaders that it was okay to ignore the self-appointed ‘experts’ and re-open their states for good.
He called out journalists for their absurd and biased questions; the hypocritical politicians who lived large while locking down their constituents; and the triple-masked medical professionals who defended mobs of BLM rioters while shaming parents who wanted to send their kids back to school.
He bore the brunt of the attacks from those in power and, in doing so, gave the American people enough breathing room to take a step back and look at what was happening around them with clear eyes. DeSantis was right. And, today, millions of people across the country are better off because of it.
On Sunday afternoon, the governor suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, saying that primary voters had made it clear they want the former president as their Republican nominee.
It couldn’t have been an easy pill to swallow. The Trump campaign ran a grotesque and dishonest primary in which the former president shared a graphic accusing DeSantis of “grooming high school girls” while his bottom-shelf surrogates accused his wife Casey of faking a breast cancer diagnosis, among many other such examples. Scorched-earth was the only way for them to run against our nation’s greatest sitting governor, whose record advancing conservative values is unassailable.
At the end of the day, DeSantis put the country’s best interests ahead of a bloody personal vendetta. In his video announcement on Sunday, the governor said that “[t]he days of putting Americans last … are over” and slammed the “repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents” before endorsing Trump.
I couldn’t have said it better. Haley may have seemed like a decent presidential contender while serving at the U.N., but the past year smashed that façade into pieces. Any candidate who uses left-wing phrases like “trans kids” and “Don’t Say Gay and who wants to criminalize anonymous speech online, push ahead with endless wars, and bring TSA-style security theater into K-12 schools doesn’t belong anywhere near our party.
Haley has never been up for this. She would fold under the pressure of a general election and leave Republicans high and dry if it meant staying respectable enough to appear on the Sunday shows.
It is time to say ‘no’ to the fecklessness and inauthenticity of these squishy moderates who bend the knee to people who hate us and whose idea of ‘reforming’ Washington, D.C., is politely nibbling around the edges of a broken system that deserves a reckoning of biblical proportion.
The general election won’t be easy with Trump on the ballot. But if he wants it enough, if he has the discipline to prosecute the case against Joe Biden and remind voters of the Good Times with cheap gas and cheap groceries, he can give us the greatest political comeback in American history and — without anything to hold him back — deliver on the promises that his voters demanded the first time around.
Brian Anderson is the president of the Saguaro Group and Arizona Capitol Oversight.