RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/06/02/pence-and-christie-to-team-up-and-help-trump-secure-gop-nomination-n1699523

“The consensus among Republicans who would prefer that Trump not be the nominee is that he can’t win the general election. I don’t believe that, although the more erratic he becomes, the more my doubts grow. If those who are running against him truly believe that, however, then they shouldn’t run against him. Again, Ron DeSantis is the only Republican alive on planet Earth right now who has even a prayer of beating Trump for the nomination. Their presence in the race divides the non-Trump primary votes and all but guarantees a Trump nomination.”

The field for the race to derail Donald Trump and win the Republican nomination is about to get a couple of familiar — some would say worn out — names added to it. Over at Townhall, my colleague Leah Barkoukis writes that former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is going to jump in the race next week in New Hampshire. Also at Townhall, Spencer Brown has the story about former Vice President Mike Pence making his announcement in Iowa next Wednesday.

Politically, both Christie and Pence are so far beyond their expiration dates that their campaigns will be accompanied by the smell of sour milk.

And I’m sure that the internet is already flooded with variations on “Christie will really make the field crowded.” I apologize for nothing.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/02/has-anyone-noticed-trump-sounds-like-a-liberal-democrat-these-days/

As Donald Trump ramps up his attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a strange trend is emerging. Most of his attacks are coming from the left.

In his speeches, posts on Truth Social, and comments to the press, Trump has been shouting things like: DeSantis wants to cut Social Security and Medicare! DeSantis did a worse job on COVID than New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo! DeSantis’ attack on Disney “is all so unnecessary, a political STUNT!”

In one recent post, Trump said that “I strongly defended and backed Ethanol, Ron ‘DeSaster’ has ALWAYS been strongly against Ethanol, just like he voted 3 times to cut Social Security (and raise the minimum age to 70!), obliterate MediCare, and charge everyone a National Sales Tax of 23%.”

Let’s start with that last one, which an ad sponsored by a pro-Trump PAC describes as a huge tax hike that would result in the middle class paying more in taxes.

The truth is that sales tax idea that DeSantis co-sponsored while in Congress – and that Trump himself supported in the past – would get rid of the federal income tax, capital gains tax, corporate income tax, payroll taxes, estate and gift taxes, and replaced them all with a national sales tax. It would include a substantial rebate to make it more progressive. It would also abolish the IRS. (Read our recent guest commentary about it – “How To Defund The IRS? Top 10 Reasons For A National Sales Tax.”)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/desantis-has-a-record-of-winning-florida-legislature-immigration-education-crime-55a32cb0?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The media has settled on two narratives about Gov. Ron DeSantis, both designed to help nominate Donald Trump and thereby re-elect Joe Biden. The first narrative is that Mr. DeSantis is unlikable. The second is that he is an extremist who bans books, erases black history and persecutes immigrants and gay people.

The narrative that Mr. DeSantis is unlikable, and therefore unelectable, is an interesting critique for a politician who has never lost an election. Politico published a lengthy column in January titled “Ron DeSantis Takes On the Likability Issue (Sort Of).” In May it added a piece asserting his wife is just as unlikable, if not more so, portraying her as a kind of Lady Macbeth. Vanity Fair published a similar piece in May, with the headline “Being an Unlikable Jerk Not Working Out So Well for Ron DeSantis.” The Atlantic ran a lengthy piece on the topic last year, with the subhead: “People who haven’t met him think he’s a hot commodity. People who have met him aren’t so sure.”

At least since 2008, we’ve heard repeatedly that it’s sexist to assess likability in politicians. The Atlantic published a piece with the subheadline, “ ‘Electability.’ ‘Likability.’ ‘Authenticity.’ The 2020 Democratic primary has found many canny ways to make misogyny plausibly deniable.” In November 2022 Politico complained about “the return of the Lady Macbeth trope” and characterized criticism of Hillary Clinton, Jill Biden and Gisele Fetterman as “a reinforcement of traditional gender roles that make any ambitious woman suspect.” Apparently, questioning a candidate’s or spouse’s likability is misogyny if the target is a female Democrat but good sport if the target is a Republican.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/five_questions_for_prospective_republican_candidates.html

We may well be living in a “fake election” era, when legalized ballot fraud, months-long voting, and nonexistent voter identification requirements give the Uniparty insurmountable advantages in “selecting” compliant “representatives” for the people.  But voting in the largest numbers possible will continue to highlight the obvious election rigging.  If for no other reason than that it makes the fraudsters’ jobs that much harder, voting still matters.  Force them to explain how precincts can turn out more votes than residents!

There’s a reason the State-controlled media never point out that Joe Biden supposedly won fifteen million more votes than Barack Obama did in 2012 and more votes than any presidential candidate in history: nobody would believe that reality if forced to confront it.  That’s why, even as the Pravda press covers up the Biden family’s quid-pro-quo crimes and pretends Dementia Joe’s gibberish proves anything other than idiotic incompetence, the Baghdad Bobs on TV never trumpet Biden’s 80 million votes.  

To do so, they would have to acknowledge that President Trump won over ten million new votes in his re-election contest and secured more votes than any other candidate in American history (aside from Biden).  The vote-riggers were actually forced to make Biden the far and away most popular candidate in American history in order to get over Trump’s legitimate vote hauls.  It’s one thing to pretend an unpopular Biden beat an even more unpopular Trump; it is entirely different for the media to pretend Biden is simply so unbelievably popular that he beat an incumbent president whose own popularity had grown significantly since his first election — a feat not achieved for a hundred and thirty years!

Vote in big numbers so that the obvious cognitive dissonance pierces the State-controlled media’s propaganda.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/05/31/trumps-truth-social-ramblings-are-reaching-kamala-harris-levels-of-incoherence-n1699558

Wow, has it really only been a little more than two-and-a-half years since I enthusiastically voted for Donald Trump for president?

There’s a guy named Donald Trump running for the 2024 Republican nomination, but he bears little resemblance to the Donald Trump I liked back in the day. For example, he does things like insist that Andrew Cuomo’s COVID response was better than that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. That would be the same Andrew Cuomo whose response sentenced New York’s elderly to death en masse.

Trump must have also forgotten that the Democrat advocates in the mainstream media spent much of 2020 holding up Cuomo as an example of how to handle the pandemic while deriding virtually everything he did.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-andrew-cuomo-covid-lockdowns-ron-desantis-florida-anthony-fauci-fef4dd6c?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The 2024 presidential race is already wild, and the strangest moment so far may be the mutual Covid admiration society of Donald Trump and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In 2020 they were mortal political enemies, but now they’re uniting to praise their performance in order to trash the far better Covid judgment and governance of Ron DeSantis in Florida.

Mr. Trump will say anything to hurt the Sunshine State Governor now running against him for President. Last week he said in a video posted on Truth Social: “How about the fact that he had the third most deaths of any state having to do with the China virus or Covid? Even Cuomo did better, he was number four.”

Mr. Cuomo returned the compliment on Tuesday from his political exile, tweeting that “Donald Trump tells the truth, finally. New York got hit first and worst but New Yorkers acted responsibly. Florida’s policy of denial allowed Covid to spread and that’s why they had a very large second wave.”

Where to begin? The media feted Mr. Cuomo for his handling of Covid in 2020, but his harsh lockdowns continue to have baleful effects on the state’s economy as its recovery lags. We also know Mr. Cuomo made a literally fatal March 2020 decision to admit Covid patients to nursing homes. His administration then tried to fudge the number of nursing-home deaths from Covid.

https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2023/05/31/the-pregame-is-over-for-trump-vs-desantis-n2623864

There’s been a huge amount of commentary on former President Donald Trump’s big lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis in national polls. In the current RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump has a 30.8-point lead — 53.2% to DeSantis’ 22.4%. That lead, while enormous, has been shrinking in the last week; on May 20, it was 36.9 points. Now, it’s six points smaller. That is something to watch in the days ahead.

But the Republican presidential nomination will not be awarded on the basis of national polls. It is, instead, a series of state contests that begins with the Iowa caucuses, moves on to the New Hampshire primary, then the South Carolina primary, then Nevada, and on from there. The early contests are incredibly important; by the time the race leaves South Carolina, the ultimate winner is usually pretty clear.

So what is the situation in Iowa? Does Trump have a huge lead there, too? Or are Iowa Republicans spreading their support among the growing field — DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy and others? A new poll from Iowa suggests the answer is the former — Trump appears to be very, very strong in the first state that will vote in 2024.

The poll, conducted May 19-22 by Emerson College Polling, found Trump with 61.7% support, followed by DeSantis with 20.1%. Pence and Haley were tied at 4.5%, with Scott at 2.1% and Ramaswamy at 2.1%.

“Trump’s lead in the caucus reflects his numbers in Emerson’s March New Hampshire primary poll, where he held a 41-point lead over DeSantis,” said Spencer Kimball, executive director of the poll, in a press release. “The former president’s base continues to be voters under 35, 75% of whom support Trump, and voters without a college degree: 70% support Trump. DeSantis’ support is higher among voters with a postgraduate degree, with 29% support, still trailing Trump’s 37% with this group.”

https://www.newsweek.com/case-ron-desantis-opinion-1802754

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ much-anticipated 2024 presidential campaign is finally here. DeSantis is, by any empirical metric or otherwise reasonable estimation, the only person with a viable chance of defeating former President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. What follows is a straightforward affirmative case for DeSantis’ candidacy, written from the perspective of someone who moved to the Sunshine State during the COVID-19 pandemic due in no small part to his courage, independent judgment, and dynamic leadership during that most woeful chapter of recent American history.

President Ronald Reagan famously said, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'” That was an accurate assessment at the time Reagan said it, when America was drowning in punitive taxation and draconian regulation. In the year 2023, by contrast, overweening government is certainly still a threat, but the single all-encompassing threat facing the American people is the metastasis of the woke ideology, which spreads like a cancer and is weaponized by the out-of-touch ruling class elites who populate all the major institutions of our political and civic life.

There is no elected official in America who better understands this reality and—even more important—who has wielded political power to repeatedly fight back against it than Ron DeSantis. Whether it is anti-Americanist critical race theory or gender ideology indoctrination in the elementary school classroom, the university faculty lounge, or the corporate boardroom, DeSantis has taken decisive measures to defend civilizational sanity and curtail or outright proscribe the dissemination of wokeism’s corrosive tenets.

https://spectator.org/trump-desantis-and-the-dangers-of-blind-loyalty/

“In 2024, we have a country to save. Any Republican who fails to vote simply because his candidate didn’t win the GOP presidential nomination is, for all intents and purposes, voting for Joe Biden and the corrupt regime he “leads.” Does anyone reading this really want that on his conscience?”

Now that Ron DeSantis has entered the race for the GOP presidential nomination, former President Trump and many of his supporters have accused the Florida governor of disloyalty. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, has suggested that DeSantis’ political ambitions have caused him to lose sight of “values like loyalty.” The basis for this claim is that DeSantis somehow owes Trump a 21st century version of feudal fealty because the latter endorsed him during Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial race. This kind of nonsense plays into the hands of the Democrats.

President Biden is already portraying “MAGA Republicans” as a threat to democracy and any aversion to genuine competition between candidates during the GOP primaries reinforces that canard. Moreover, Trump’s petty personal attacks on DeSantis make the former president appear weak and many of his policy criticisms of the Sunshine State’s governor sound like Democratic talking points. He has claimed, for example, that New York’s disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo did a better job than DeSantis on COVID-19 policy. The latter responded to this risible assertion in an interview with the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro:

First of all, Florida had less excess mortality than California or New York. Part of that is because states like California had excess mortality derived from the lockdown policy, which is really, really avoidable mortality. But if he thinks Cuomo handled it better, that’s an indication if something like this were to happen again, he would double down and do what he did in March of 2020. That was a difficult situation. We didn’t have all the facts … but we all have to sit here today in 2023, look back on March of 2020 and say, Faucism was wrong. Faucism was destructive.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4020502-ron-desantis-the-good-the-bad-and-the-beautiful/

His campaign launch was something of a bust, but Ron DeSantis is nonetheless the man of the hour.

Through a conversation with Elon Musk hosted on Twitter Spaces that struggled to cope with an overwhelming audience, and in subsequent interviews on Fox News, Florida’s governor finally declared that he is running for president. In effect, he declared war on frontrunner Donald Trump. His supporters say it’s about time — Trump long ago declared war on him.

There has probably never before been a presidential candidate who has been so pummeled and bruised before even stepping into the ring. DeSantis has taken it on the chin not only from Trump but also from Democrats.

Why this pounding? Because all parties know DeSantis is a formidable, young and accomplished candidate with a superb record and CV who absolutely can beat President Biden. Polling says so, and so does common sense.

In late April, a poll showed that Biden would wallop Trump in a head-to-head but lose to DeSantis. More important, that same survey showed Florida’s governor beating Biden in most critical swing states; only in Wisconsin are the two men running neck and neck.

Of course, polls are changeable, and DeSantis has lost ground in recent months as Trump has vilified him, running nasty, mud-slinging ads about his votes in Congress and disparaging his accomplishments as governor.

Last fall, Trump warned DeSantis not to get in the race, threatening to dish “things” that were not “very flattering” about the governor. A day later, he called him a “fine guy.” Responding to the recent entry of Tim Scott into the race, Trump posted, “Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable.”

Trump’s unanswered parries have taken a toll, but do not count DeSantis out. Part of Trump’s surge in the polls has stemmed from what many feel are the politically inspired legal attacks on the former president. Outrage about what appears to be two systems of justice, while maddening, will only take Trump so far. Will a majority of the country really support a man who has now been found guilty of sexual assault?