RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ron DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race Sunday afternoon and endorsed former president Donald Trump, announcing the suspension of an embattled campaign that began with a bungled launch on Twitter Spaces with a video posted to the same platform just two days before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.

DeSantis acknowledged in the video announcement Sunday afternoon that he no longer had a “clear path to victory” in 2024, but emphasized that his political career is just beginning. “While this campaign has ended, the mission continues. Down here in Florida, we will continue to show the country how to lead,” the governor said. Coinciding with the video announcement, DeSantis canceled a meet-and-greet event with voters originally scheduled for 5 P.M. in Manchester, New Hampshire.

DeSantis’s departure comes after his allies had spent days making calls to top donors asking whether the candidate should drop out ahead of the New Hampshire primary, as first reported by National Review. The bundler page on the campaign’s finance website was no longer working earlier that day, which signaled the campaign, NR reported earlier Sunday, which signaled that a drop-out announcement was imminent.

DeSantis had put all his eggs in the Iowa basket, which won him some key endorsements from Governor Kim Reynolds and influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. But given that DeSantis and his allied PACs invested heavily in Iowa to the exclusion of New Hampshire, Trump’s roughly 30-point defeat proved a fatal blow to a campaign that was already on life support.

While DeSantis initially publicly claimed he punched his ticket out of Iowa and was staying in the race, the pro-DeSantis PAC Never Back Down was hit by layoffs last week and the campaign had canceled scheduled media appearances in recent days.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/get-ready-for-the-nevertrump-follies-on-steroids/

This election year marks the eighth anniversary of unhinged NeverTrump invective, and Trump Derangement Syndrome swamp-fevers. Just as mothers in England during the Napoleonic Wars frightened their wayward children with threats of “Boney” coming to get them, the Dems are revving up Trump’s “threats to our democracy,” “autocratic” ambitions, and schemes to take away our freedom and unalienable rights. Arguments ad Hitlerum soon will be flying fast and thick, and the slavish corporate media have loaded up on “big lies” and sharpened their poison pens.

If you think 2016-23 was bad, this year the Democrats are desperate for many reasons: their catatonic candidate, his son Hunter’s white-trash sleazy vices and international grifting, multiple policy failures at home and abroad, and underwater polls numbers––for 76% of voters Biden is “too old to effectively serve another term.” All these problems will abet the Democrats’ patent lies, suborning of federal agencies and courts, fake horror stories about the January 6 “insurrection,” and shameless projections of their own autocratic inclinations and lust for power onto their political opponents.

This last Dem bad habit is particularly mendacious and dripping with hypocrisy. In last week’s January 6 anniversary speech at Valley Forge, Biden read, “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind.” But Donald Trump is “willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”

What better example of the brazen shamelessness that Adolf Hitler said typifies the “big lie”? The “grossly impudent lie” and “colossal untruths” are so preposterous that listeners “would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” We all know which faction censors speech, shouts down speakers, punishes dissidents with personal and professional “cancellation” and smears, and keeps an index librorum prohibitorum cataloguing which thoughts, ideas, persons, and words cannot be written or spoken.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/17/corruption-charges-still-loom-as-major-barrier-to-biden-reelection-in-2024-ii-tipp-poll/

Much of the discussion over whether President Joe Biden will drop out of the 2024 presidential race centers on his increasingly obvious age-related issues. But a potentially more serious problem awaits Biden, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll suggests: Strong evidence that he illegally profited from public office while vice president under former President Barack Obama.

At 81 years of age and with painful difficulties handling his official duties, Biden’s waning mental acuity has become a serious issue. But while age and a record low approval rating are major impediments to Biden’s reelection, the pile of evidence amassed in Congress’ investigation into Biden’s and son Hunter’s legally questionable business dealings could prove lethal to his presidency.

I&I/TIPP posed the following question to U.S. voters in August of 2023: “A congressional
committee claims it has strong evidence that President Biden and his family took millions of
dollars in bribes from foreign nations. If those claims turn out to be true, President Biden
should:”

Voters were given a choice of possible answers: “Resign immediately,” “Be impeached and
removed from office,” “Be allowed to finish his term in office, but not run again,” “Run again in
2024, regardless of the findings,” and “Not sure.”

A strong majority of 67% in our poll suggested that President Joe Biden should either be
impeached (43%) or resign immediately (24%) if the charges prove true. Just 15% said Biden
should “Be allowed to finish his term in office, but not run again,” and another 8% said “Run
again in 2024, regardless of the findings.” One in six (17%) weren’t sure.

The most recent I&I/TIPP national online poll was taken from Jan. 3-5 included 1,401 adults,
with a +/-2.6 percentage-point margin of error.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/01/illinois_citizens_group_files_formal_complaint_with_state_board_of_elections.html

A couple from Illinois, Jodie and Ken Zitko, have formed a group of concerned citizens who have been analyzing the Illinois state voter database.  They have found serious irregularities, detailed in a formal complaint filed with Bernadette Matthews, director of the Illinois State Board of Elections on December 21.

Here are some of their findings after almost 2,000 hours of analysis.  

There were over 300,000 votes from the 2020 election missing or deleted from the Illinois voter data prior to the conclusion of the federal retention period of 22 months.  
Over a four-year period, Illinois population decreased by 150,000, while the voter roll increased by 650,000.  
Over 2.5 million people had votes cast prior to their registration dates.  
More than 230,000 registrations show seemingly Illegal or illogical registration dates.  
There are more than 4 million apparent registration violations out of 8.9 million registrations.

This couple is not your ordinary pair of election sleuths.  Ken has been an MSSQL Data Analyst, DBA, and architect for 28 years, working with Fortune 50 companies, and Jodie has been working with “People Data” and analytics since the mid-’90s in large enterprise environments.  She’s a “subject matter expert” in integrated workplace management systems.  

They were able to view a copy of the Illinois State Board of Elections voter roll while working for a candidate for the U.S. Senate.  The couple also did an informal study of Illinois voting history, which began when they decided to check their own records.  They were shocked to find that their history showed votes cast in three midterm elections when they had never voted in a midterm election.  Ken did vote in the 2008 presidential election, but there was no indication of a vote.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ramaswamy-drops-out-of-presidential-race-endorses-trump/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=article

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy announced Monday night that he is suspending his presidential campaign after a lackluster showing in the Iowa caucuses.

In a speech announcing his exit from the race, Ramaswamy endorsed former president Donald Trump, who was projected to have won the caucuses by a strong margin, according to the Associated Press and other media outlets.

With an estimated 95 percent of votes counted, Trump was winning with 51 percent of the vote, followed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in second at 21.2 percent and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in third with 19.1 percent. Ramaswamy was in a distant fourth at 7.7 percent.

“There’s no path for me to be the next president, absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country,” Ramaswamy told his supporters. “And I think that I am very worried for our country. I think we are skating on thin ice as a nation.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/15/lawfare-against-trump-is-running-out-of-gas/

We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.

The prosecutors began accelerating their indictments only once Trump started to lead incumbent Joe Biden by sizable margins in head-to-head polls. Moreover, had Trump not run for the presidency, or had he been of the same party as most of the four prosecutors, he would have never been indicted by any of them.

Yet now they are in a doom loop of discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these star-chamber proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

In truth, each succeeding cycle of corrupt leftwing lawfare that ends in failure—the Russian collusion hoax, the weaponized first impeachment, trying ex-president Trump in the Senate as a private citizen, the laptop disinformation set-up, the Alfa bank ping caper, the pathetic attempt to erase Trump from state ballots, and the unfolding Fani Willis moral debacle—does not return things to zero.

Rather, they serve as force multipliers for each other. Each overreach geometrically increases the dangers to democracy, ever more turns the public off, and ironically cascades sympathy and poll numbers for the very target of their paranoias.

Some of the prosecutors have colluded with White House lawyers and congressional liaisons. Some had run for office, offering campaign promises to get Trump convicted for something or other.

Now, after years of delays and deadends, all four are rushing to synchronize their trial dates to ensure that the front-running Trump is on the docket daily and not out on the 2024 campaign trail.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/14/trumps-resurgence-draws-parallels-to-reagans-1980-upset-victory/

It’s hard to recapture the contempt with which Reagan was excoriated by the best and the brightest, but it was just as visceral and widespread as the animus against Trump in 2016 and today.

The 2024 presidential election is still more than 10 months away, but already there is a lot of déjà vu all over again about the festivity.

The smart money—which does not, I hasten to add, mean that it will turn out to be the most accurate money—has been telling us for months that wily Democrats have engineered Trump’s nomination because, clever chaps that they are, they know he cannot possibly win the election.

The main reason adduced is that Trump is not sufficiently popular to win.  How do said pundits know this?  Some point to the polls, though the polls have not been cooperating on that front of late. Trump is ahead in all or nearly all the swing states, and more and more polls put him ahead of Biden in the general election.  Some adduce Trump’s “character,” his behavior after the 2020 election, and the cornucopia of indictments he faces in four separate jurisdictions.  Back in December, Byron York summed up the state of play with this headline: “As Trump lead widens, prosecutors step up pursuit.”

What do you suppose most people think of that? What, I mean, do they think of a situation in which one political candidate is targeted by the opposing political party—which party, it may almost go without saying, totally controls the coercive instruments of state power?  I believe most people don’t like it.  They don’t like it because it reeks of basic unfairness and totalitarian overreach.

But that’s where we are now.  Who knows, perhaps Jack Smith, Fani Willis, or Letitia James will finally nab Trump on one charge or another.  After all, the net designed to capture the former president has been spread far and wide. But I would not be so sure.  Everywhere one looks, the cases against him have come more and more to resemble the House of Usher. Fani Willis put her boyfriend on the payroll and ordered him to get Trump. Unfortunately, that secret intimacy is making headlines everywhere. The news threatens to collapse the case against Trump in Georgia.

Prosecutors in New York and Washington can rely on biased judges and juries. But I suspect that even if Trump is convicted of something in one or both places, he will win on appeal. The cases against him long ago took on the slightly comical aspect of a vendetta.

https://spectator.org/nikki-haley-stands-up-for-the-swamp/

One of the hazards of running for president is making a remark in front of cameras that quickly points out why you’re not the right candidate.

This brings to mind this recent, decidedly telling remark from former Gov./UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in her race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Haley said of former President Donald Trump:

The reality is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him, and we all know that’s true … and we can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.

Translation?

Haley, in a blink, made herself the symbol of what millions of Americans have come to see as exactly what’s wrong with the country. Her comment is a clear representation that she is first and last a supporter of what Americans have come to call “The Swamp.”

What is “The Swamp”? It is Status Quo Washington and the Status Quo Establishment in the country at large.

The Swamp could be corrupt Old Order bureaucrats in the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice trying to thwart, first, a presidential election that elects Trump. Then, when that failed in 2016, The Swamp spent four years seeking to disrupt the president and his entire administration.

The legal arm of the Swamp, whether in Washington, New York, or Georgia, has spent endless amounts of time to impeach and/or indict President Trump, deliberately weaponizing and corrupting the legal system to do so.

The Swamp includes a corrupted media that makes it its mission to not report the news that doesn’t fit The Swamp’s objectives. The suppression by Big Tech and Big Government of the 2020 New York Post exclusive about Hunter Biden’s laptop is exactly The Swamp at work. 

On and on — and on and on — goes The Swamp in its obsession with controlling America and all of its different entities. The Swamp wants complete cultural and political control of America. Its players see themselves as having a God-given right to run America, whether they are in the federal bureaucracy, the media, academia, and more.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/01/11/winner_of_the_desantis-haley_debate_150313.html

After two hours of going at each other with hammer and tong, there was a clear winner at the debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley at Drake University last night sponsored by CNN. But he wasn’t in the building.

Instead, Donald Trump was across town, speaking at a town hall hosted by a different cable network, floating the tantalizing claim that he has already chosen his running mate.

If it seems brazen to make an announcement before the first primary season votes have been cast, there’s a reason: With less than a week before the Iowa caucuses, Trump maintains a sizeable – possibly insurmountable – lead over his nearest rivals. A big victory for Trump next Monday night would put him in a position to run the table of early states and cruise toward the nomination – notwithstanding his mounting legal difficulties.

And, as has been the case so often through the primary process, the bickering and infighting among his main challengers that took place on the debate stage in Des Moines last night only served to help the former president’s campaign.

They didn’t waste any time on niceties, either.

In his opening statement, DeSantis rehashed Haley’s recent remarks in New Hampshire where she seemed to acknowledge Trump’s looming victory in Iowa by telling New Hampshire voters that they can “correct” Iowa’s caucus results.

“We don’t need another mealy-mouthed politician who just tells you what she thinks you want to hear just to try to get your vote, then to get into office and to do her donors’ bidding,” DeSantis said.