Last updated on July 21st, 2023 at 05:33 pm
Ron DeSantis, who on August 28th won the Republican nomination for governor of Florida, is getting off to a rough start, much to the delight of his Democratic opponents in the Sunshine State. It turns out that his lieutenant governor running mate once tweeted that “Trump is the biggest conman there is,” according to Florida’s Sun-Sentinel newspapers.
DeSantis is currently a Member of Congress from Florida’s 6th Congressional District, but he has never had any tough competition and never had to campaign very hard to get elected. He also is my Congressman, and I know what a horrible job he has done in Congress for his constituents, and what a horrible governor he would be for Florida. (For the record, he receives most of his financial backing from the Koch Brothers and their donor network.)
DeSantis won the GOP nomination by sucking up to Donald Trump as much as possible. He made a disgusting TV ad where he used his young children as props as he taught them how to build a wall with toy blocks while he read excerpts to them from one of Trump’s books.
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After winning the nomination by being the most pro-Trump candidate, he immediately went full-blown racist on his African American opponent, Andrew Gillum, the current mayor of Tallahassee. He said that electing Gillum would “monkey up” the state of Florida.
In addition to that it has now been revealed that “Rubber Stamp Ron” (his nickname for approving all of Trump’s agenda) has been an administrator of a white nationalist Facebook group. This has allowed him to show his true racist colors for all the world to see. In short, he is a confirmed racist, and doesn’t even try to hide it, which he thinks will help him win the governorship of a deep South state.
But two recent polls show that DeSantis is running behind Gillum already. And the latest fiasco to hit the DeSantis campaign may be the worst one of all. He chose a young Cuban-American woman from the Miami area to be his running mate for lieutenant governor, as he tried to appeal to the Hispanic and the woman vote.
What he didn’t know — and what his campaign advisers didn’t tell him — is that his new running mate, Jeanette Nuñez, was a strongly anti-Trump Mario Rubio supporter during the 2016 presidential primaries. In fact, she went so far as expressing herself on Twitter writing (in a tweet that has since been deleted). She wrote:
“Wake up Florida voters, Trump is the biggest con-man there is.”
She also added the hashtags “#supportsKKK” and “#nevertrump,” before endorsing Rubio.
Even though the tweet was deleted after DeSantis named her his running mate, the damage has been done. Now everyone knows that Jeanette Nuñez will be lying if she ever says anything positive about DeSantis’s role model, Donald Trump.
There are less than two months until election day, and it appears that Ron DeSantis has an uphill battle as he tries to win the Florida governorship while also shooting himself in the foot.
I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.
