GREENVILLE, S.C. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday finally announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race.
As such, Thursday saw the first flurry of interviews published between DeSantis and primarily conservative platforms. Among the idioms and adulations that start, end and fill such conversations, we’re also getting our first glimpses of the potential policy pledges this governor could ride to Washington.
In an interview with “The Tara Show,” hosted on the Greenville, South Carolina-based news/talk radio station 98.9 WORD, DeSantis discussed some of what he intended to do on day one if elected the 47th president of the United States.
“So I think border, economy and reining in the administrative state and the bureaucracy (are priorities), and I think there is a lot of other issues that flow from all of those, but I will work to shut the border down. Day one, we will declare a national emergency. We are not going to be entertaining millions of people flooding in with bogus asylum claims. We are going to hold the drug cartels accountable. I will actually construct the border wall. I know how to use the levers of power to be able to get that done, and we will make that happen,” DeSantis said.
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Concerning how he plans to reach the White House in the first place, DeSantis appeared confident that his landslide reelection victory could be replicated on a national scale, claiming on “The Tara Show” and other programs Thursday that it was not only Republicans and Independents who voted him back in, but Democrats to some significant degree as well.
“You can get people who aren’t Republicans to come and vote for us, and that’s the thing, you can’t do Florida by 20 points just getting Republicans. We won independents by 18%, and we even converted Democrats. I think the registration change you’ve seen in Florida since I’ve been governor, part of it is people have migrated here, but part of it is we are getting a lot of those blue-collar Democrats, a lot of Latinos switching from Democrat to Republican,” he said. “So can it be done nationally? Yes, I think it needs to be done nationally because I don’t think we have a path to victory unless you show that you’re able to have a bold agenda that’s going to attract more than just our core base, and what I’ve told people is: the time for excuses is over for Republicans. I am sick of this culture of losing.”
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Elsewhere Thursday on the syndicated “Clay & Buck” podcast, the hosts got DeSantis to share his preliminaries regarding the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the potential pardoning of tried and convicted Jan. 6 rioters. It would seem these items would also receive “Day one″ attention, according to the interview in which DeSantis calls the DOJ and FBI “weaponized.”
“And so what I’m going to do is — I’m going to do on day one — I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” DeSantis said. “I will do that at the front end. A lot of people wait until the end of the administration to issue pardons, we’re going to find examples where the government’s been weaponized against disfavored groups and we will apply relief as appropriate.”
As the hosts pressed DeSantis on whether those Jan. 6 pardons could reach former president Donald Trump, the governor said that any example — “no matter how small or how big” — was up for review.
That process would also lead to firings, the governor told Tara. In his words, the government as a whole needs to be “re-constitutionalized.”
“You have FBI people colluding with social media networks to censor things like Hunter Biden’s story and this other stuff, I would fire those people the next day. You can’t go out and abuse your power and have no repercussions, and so this fourth branch of government that has developed over many, many decades, you know, we are going to bring that to heel, and we have to do it because we right now have a situation in our country, the most significant issues generally now don’t even go through the Congress, the people we vote to represent us, they’re done through the bureaucracy,” DeSantis said. “You see it with Biden, with what he’s trying to do with energy, with what he’s trying to do for so many other issues; that is not the people governing themselves when that happens and so our view is we need to return the government to its rightful owners, we the people.”
The governor said that E-Verify would also come to the nation, which requires businesses to verify the immigration status of workers before employing them. According to DeSantis, Florida became the largest state in the country to use E-Verify in totality when he signed SB 1718 into law earlier this month. While DeSantis acknowledged the difficulties expected with trying to get such legislation through Congress, he told “Clay & Buck” it’s what Republicans want.
The Four Seasons Hotel in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood prepared to welcome DeSantis’ top donors on Thursday, according to News 6 partner Local 10 News.
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