As some have already observed on thread and others.

The GOP doesn't get to wipe off the 'deep stain' of Donald Trump and move on to Ron DeSantis so easily: ex-RNC chair


Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 2022.Win McNamee/Getty Images

• 
  Former RNC chairman Michael Steele says GOP leadership can't move on so easily from Trump.
  
  
• He said the GOP would much rather focus on the "bright, shiny" Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
  
  
• Trump left a deep stain on the GOP after the Capitol riot and by meeting Nick Fuentes, Steele said.
  

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele says that while the Republican Party would like to move on from former President Donald Trump, it won't be easy to do.

Speaking on MSNBC on Wednesday, Steele said Republican leaders seemed eager to focus on other possible GOP presidential candidates for 2024, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

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"They want all of us at this point to fixate on, 'We're past Trump, we're no longer doing Trump," Steele said.

"Oh, Trump was bad. Oh, this bright, shiny object down in Florida. Let's focus on that in Gov. DeSantis," Steele said of the GOP and its narrative. "But I'm sorry, you don't get to wipe that stain off your clean white shirt that easily because that's a deep stain."

Steele referred to Trump's dinner with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West as yet another stain.

"Embracing Fuentes was a deep stain. While you may not have done so directly, the leader of your party did," Steele added. "And as the head of your party and as a leader on the Hill or representing the party across the country at the state level, if you don't reject that, then that's you, baby."

Steele was the chairman of the RNC between 2009 and 2011. He is now a vocal critic of Trump and a commentator on MSNBC.

DeSantis has not announced his 2024 candidacy but is considered one of the GOP's leading candidates for the 2024 presidential ticket.

Trump, who declared his bid for the 2024 GOP ticket on November 15, received considerable backlash after dining with Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago on November 22. Fuentes marched in the 2017 white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, during which an avowed neo-Nazi drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring 35 other people.

Several GOP figures have blasted Trump for the dinner. On Friday, former GOP governor Chris Christie called the meeting "another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump" and a sign that Trump is an "untenable general election candidate." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday also slammed Trump for meeting with Ye and Fuentes, saying there is "no room" in the GOP for white supremacy.

A spokesperson at Trump's post-presidential press office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

 

It will be interesting if Mr de'Santis gets nominated and Mr Trump decides to stand as a 3nd candidate..split vote ???

 

Yep. I'd love to see how that would play out. A trumptard going up against Trump himself. Now that would make for some interesting entertainment.

 

A long way to 2024.
Wonder who the despicables will be propping up?

 

And with a split vote it would allow the Democrats to win with a bigger majority. However I could see Trump and de'Santis stand together with Trump as POTUS and De'Santis would run in 2028 with Trump's endorsement.Unless Trump changed the law to stand again like Putin President for life....

 

Editor's note. No Desantis photos. That sick fuck likes to surround himself with kids and use them for props. And its too easy for me to miss a kid in his photos. So I am trying to stop taking the chance.



DeSantis blasted for 'Orwellian' vaccine investigation


Alexander Nazaryan
·Senior White House Correspondent
Thu, December 15, 2022 at 7:27 AM



One day after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a push to investigate alleged harms caused by coronavirus vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, criticized the move as a pointless exercise that would only undermine public confidence in efforts to boost and maintain protection against the circulating pathogen.

“We have a vaccine that, unequivocally, is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives,” Fauci said Wednesday on CNN. “What’s the problem with vaccines?”

The problem is vaccines have become part of America’s polarized politics. Since the advent of COVID-19 vaccines late in the Trump administration, skepticism of the established medical science has become a kind of creed for many conservatives, as well as for some on the far left. Political disagreements about lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine requirements have hardened into antipathy toward the vaccines themselves.


Seizing on rare adverse side effects and diminishing effectiveness — the result of new variants and low booster uptake — vaccine critics have dismissed inoculation as ineffective and potentially dangerous.

Some have also embraced outlandish conspiracy theories about vaccines as a form of government and corporate control.


During a pandemic-related hearing in the House, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland progressive, called the proposed grand jury an “Orwellian” development. “These actions are transparently designed to falsely suggest that coronavirus vaccines, and not the coronavirus itself, are dangerous,” he said Wednesday.

Widely expected to seek the Republican nomination in 2024, DeSantis played open to those concerns on Tuesday, when he announced that he would call for Florida's Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” He is also seeking “further surveillance into sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine in Florida.”

Such deaths are rare, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose vaccine surveillance statistics indicate that 17,868 people — or 0.0027% of vaccine recipients — died after their shots. But those reports unquestionably include thousands of deaths that happened after vaccination but had nothing to do with the vaccines themselves.

Vaccine skeptics have often used reports of supposed side effects — such as those to a vaccine database that does not require confirmation — to exaggerate supposed dangers. And such critics invariably downplay the fact that vaccines are exceptionally effective at stopping serious and critical COVID-19 illness, which has killed more than 6.6 million people globally.


And with online misinformation and partisan politics exercising strong pressures on the American public, vaccine fears have been easily exploited, leading to low uptake among Republicans. As a consequence, heavily Republican areas have had higher death rates than Democratic ones.

In Florida, more than 83,000 people have died from COVID-19, and cases there have been rising recently. DeSantis, who has decried what he describes as “Faucism” (the echoes of “fascism” are difficult to miss), downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic from the start, though he has also been credited for opening schools and other businesses well before Democratic counterparts, some of whom remained in a cautious crouch well into 2021.

Earlier this year, DeSantis clashed with former President Donald Trump for supporting vaccination, refusing to say whether he received a booster shot; Trump shot back by calling DeSantis “gutless.”

DeSantis has also regularly attacked Fauci in personal terms. “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac,” he said earlier this year of Fauci, who has been the face of the pandemic for both the Trump and Biden administrations. (He was eventually sidelined by the former in favor of experts closer in line with DeSantis’s views.)




In late 2021, DeSantis hired Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Ladapo has had no experience with infectious diseases and has routinely attacked vaccination and masking. “With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines,” Ladapo said after Tuesday’s event.


The announcement by DeSantis comes days after new Twitter owner Elon Musk attacked Fauci on Twitter, calling for his prosecution. A supporter of DeSantis, Musk has argued that prior to his ownership, Twitter executives suppressed information on the coronavirus that presumably undermined public health messaging.

Last week, he invited Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — an outspoken critic of pandemic precautions — to Twitter’s headquarters. Bhataccharya, who has advised DeSantis in the past, will be on the governor’s new public safety committee, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (a co-author, with Bhatacharrya, of the pro-reopening Great Barrington Declaration) and Bret Weinstein, a quasi-celebrity on the so-called Intellectual Dark Web with no professional experience in vaccinology.

“I’m not sure what they’re trying to do down there,” Fauci said in the Wednesday CNN interview. Though he is about to retire after four decades of federal service, he is likely to face calls to testify from House Republicans, who continue to accuse him of making misleading statements on masks, vaccines and the origins of the coronavirus.

As his retirement has approached, Fauci has been increasingly vocal and defiant about the challenges revealed by the nation’s faltering coronavirus response, which has left more than a million people dead in the U.S.

In a New York Times essay, Fauci lamented the role “disinformation and political ideology” have played in sowing doubt about masks, vaccines and other measures.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/de-santis-blasted-for-orwellian-vaccine-investigation-142726510.html

 

This bit of propaganda brought to you by a media and government that really does think you're that stupid.

 

We have to remember, even though a lot of people died of Covid19 and Covid19 related complications, and a lot of them were older Republican voters, they were old and going to die soon anyway.

Old Republicans just can't be relied upon to show up at the next election, and are less likely to mail in an early ballot, so losing a disproportionate amount to a preventable disease is an acceptable loss.

The important thing is to convince younger Republicans that vaccines are hazardous, no matter what people who went to college say about it. Even though most GOP office holders and candidates did go to college, it's vital they demonstrate that nothing was learned from the experience.

 

As and Indy it’s amazing to me that people will watch Democrats destroy the country but still support them.

 

DeSantis wants people held accountable on COVID in Florida. You first, governor

Sarasota Herald-Tribune Editorial Board
Wed, December 21, 2022 at 7:19 AM MST


Gov. Ron DeSantis wants the Florida Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury to investigate potential wrongdoing by the medical community regarding how it informed Floridians about COVID-19 vaccines and their actual efficacy.

In other words, DeSantis is seeking the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of sorts, to hold responsible those who have supposedly failed to fully protect Florida against a virus that’s killed more than 83,000 in this state since early 2020.

More:Florida: The 'freedom state' that still isn't free of COVID

But let us never lose sight of the following:

Over the past two years, few leaders have outdone DeSantis in discouraging mask mandates that have clearly been beneficial, blocking access to vaccine shots that have clearly saved lives and downplaying the gravity of a global pandemic that has clearly been catastrophic, with more than 1 million lives lost in the United States alone.



Given all that, if any panel needs to be conjured up to demand that amends are made for failing to safeguard Florida’s well-being amid COVID, shouldn’t DeSantis be among the first summoned to appear before it?



(no photos of DeSantis. There is probably a kid in there somewhere.)
Gov. Ron DeSantis held a panel discussion Tuesday questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
Doesn’t our governor have much more to answer for regarding COVID’s grim impact on Florida than members of the scientific community? They have certainly done far more to diminish the pandemic's toll than he has, with their remarkable efforts to quickly develop, distribute and administer a range of life-saving medicine.

The conventional wisdom is that DeSantis is clamoring for a grand jury to investigate the science community because it is: a) another way to boost his 2024 presidential aspirations (especially among America's all-too-sizeable contingent of COVID vaccine skeptics, and b) another way to settle scores with medical experts who have admirably pushed back against the governor’s campaign to encourage Floridians to ignore the realities of COVID.

But neither of those reasons – or any other, for that matter – can possibly justify DeSantis' latest attempt to treat COVID as a cheap political opportunity, and not as a serious public health issue.

And that's why when it comes to DeSantis’ call for others to be held accountable on COVID in our state, this three-word reply should suffice:

You first, governor.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/desantis-wants-people-held-accountable-115633894.html

 

Well that is about the biggest load of bullshit yet on the forum.

 

Trump knocks DeSantis as ‘RINO GLOBALIST’
by Julia Shapero - 02/01/23 10:39 AM ET

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Former President Trump accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of being a “RINO GLOBALIST” on Wednesday, continuing his attacks on the potential 2024 contender widely viewed as his biggest competition for the Republican nomination.

“The real Ron is a RINO GLOBALIST, who closed quickly down Florida and even its beaches,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “Loved the Vaccines and wasted big money on ‘Testing.’ How quickly people forget!”


RINO, one of Trump’s favorite jabs for his fellow Republicans, stands for “Republican in Name Only.”

Trump has repeatedly attacked DeSantis as he continues to ramp up his own 2024 campaign, which he launched just one week after the midterm elections in November.

In his latest series of jabs at the Florida governor, Trump accused DeSantis on Saturday of “trying to rewrite history” on his COVID-19 response and claimed it would be “a great act of disloyalty” for DeSantis to launch his own presidential bid.

“If he runs, that’s fine. I’m way up in the polls. He’s going to have to do what he wants to do, but he may run,” Trump said following a campaign swing through New Hampshire and South Carolina over the weekend. “I do think it would be a great act of disloyalty because, you know, I got him in. He had no chance. His political life was over.”

The former president, who endorsed DeSantis in 2018, has often taken credit for DeSantis’s first successful bid for governor.

DeSantis has largely refused to engage Trump amid the attacks.


“I roll out of bed. I have people attacking me from all angles,” the Florida governor said at a press conference on Tuesday. “It’s been happening for many, many years.”


However, DeSantis did hit back on the accusations about his COVID-19 record.

“When you’re an elected executive, you have to make all kinds of decisions. You got to steer that ship,” DeSantis said. “And the good thing is, is that the people are able to render a judgment on that — whether they reelect you or not.”


“And I’m happy to say, you know, in my case, not only did we win reelection, we won with the highest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate has in the history of the state of Florida,” he added.



https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3839233-trump-knocks-desantis-as-rino-globalist/

 

DeSantis Slams Trump For Pedo Meme: ‘I Don’t Spend My Time Trying to Smear Other Republicans!’
By Ken MeyerFeb 8th, 2023, 12:20 pm
2133 comments



Florida Governor Ron DeSantis returned fire on former President Donald Trump’s attempt to depict him as a “groomer” who partied around with young women.

The ex-president took his attacks on DeSantis to a new level this week when he posted a series of memes on Truth Social to depict the governor as a someone who got drunk and partied with students back when DeSantis was a high school teacher. Since DeSantis is now holding conversations about how to make it easier for government officials to sue the media for defamation, a reporter asked on Wednesday if his proposal would address Trump’s “damaging” posts about him.


After defending his panel proposals, DeSantis got more direct about Trump’s attack:

“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” DeSantis said to applause. “That’s how I spend my time. I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/d...nd-my-time-trying-to-smear-other-republicans/

 

This is a typical miscalculation on Trump's part.

"Groomer" is just another insult, used in the same way as "socialist" or "woke". It has no meaning, other than to attack a target. The MAGA base is not going to care about what DeSantes did when he was a high school teacher. MAGA considers high school girls and porn stars to be pretty much the same thing.

Now, Trump wants to transform teen age girls into some kind of protected class, as if he never met Matt Gaetz or Roy Moore.

 

DeSantis has adopted those of Trump's stands that are popular, such as Trump's opposition to third world immigration and critical race theory. Nevertheless, he lacks Trump's glaring deficiencies of character, personality, and intellect.

This is why Democrats need to take DeSantis seriously as a presidential candidate for 2024.

 

Shooter spotted your error there @Distant Lover and fixed it for you.
No need to thank Shooter. He was pleased to fix it for you.

 

Desantis is just another trumptard. He owes everything to Trump. As we saw in 2020. The country had enough of Trump. Trump version 2 will excite the MAGA crowd, but that's all.

 

Because I am a Democrat, I hope you are right about this. If DeSantis is not elected president in 2024 I will admit my mistake. Will you admit yours if he is elected?

 

And what makes you so right about this is while once Trump and DeSantis both used the same lying phony authoritarian tactics now that they are rivals they have to use the same tactics against each other. And that both exposes their lying phony attacking tactics and at the same time splinters their supporters. And both sides are now in attack mode. Although of course DeSantis has to be a coward about it and instead of taking Trump on himself he is using surrogates to do it. And there are lots of them because most treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans see Trump going down and DeDantis as their best hope. But of course the Trump cult followers will fight to the death. And with any luck they will kill each other off.

 

'The View' host admits she was wrong to claim DeSantis is 'erasing' Black history
Alyssa Farah Griffin acknowledged on Twitter she 'accidentally misrepresented' the Florida governor





"The View" co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin offered a mea culpa after she faced backlash for making an erroneous claim about Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

On Thursday's broadcast, Farah Griffin accused DeSantis of "erasing" Black history for opposing the AP African American History course, which had a curriculum he said included a "political agenda."

After Fox News Digital ran a report Friday morning about the fiery criticism she received, Farah Griffin took to Twitter and acknowledged she "accidentally misrepresented" DeSantis, a lightning rod for criticism in mainstream media and a rumored 2024 presidential hopeful.

"Sooo I got tripped up on a point re: DeSantis/ AP black history on air & accidentally misrepresented what the Governor is challenging," Farah Griffin wrote Friday. "It’s more narrow than how I framed it, & while I still personally disagree, I own that I explained it wrong."

She continued, "My mom always taught me that when you’re wrong admit it, say sorry, and get it right next time."

DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin (no relation) replied, "'Accidental misrepresentation' is a bizarre phenomenon in corporate media that seems to happen a lot when talking about @GovRonDeSantis. Truly inexplicable."

"Nonetheless, thank you @Alyssafarah for correcting the record and speaking up for the truth," the press secretary added.

While Farah Griffin offered the apology on Twitter, she made no on-air mention of the error during Friday's broadcast of "The View" despite the show's multiple references to Black History Month. Notably, the reach of the "View" audience, which averaged 2.4 million viewers at the end of January (according to Nielsen Media Research), is much greater than Farah Griffin's Twitter following, which is less than 104,000 users.

DeSantis' office told Fox News Digital, "The right thing to do would be to make an on air correction" but suggested her tweeted statement correcting the record was enough.

ABC News declined to comment.




Thursday's conversation began with co-host Whoopi Goldberg suggesting DeSantis and Republican Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, both of whom are aiming to uproot critical race theory ideology from their states' education systems, were "scared" of something they learned about Black history as students themselves.

"What Ron DeSantis did with banning AP Black History — that is going way further than what many members of my party have raised concerns with," Farah Griffin said. "So there's a lot of parents who get concerned with elements of critical race theory getting into schools… I think it's an important distinction because what he's doing is so absurd. And it's going so far."

DeSantis' office blasted the hosts' comments, telling Fox News Digital they were "both dishonest and incorrect."

The Florida Department of Education's website states that studies of the history of African Americans must include "the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery," "the enslavement experience," "abolition" and "the history and contributions of Americans of the African diaspora to society." Legislation signed into law by DeSantis in 2020 requires the teaching of historical events including African American history.

At a press conference last month, DeSantis said his state's educational standards "require teaching Black history" and slammed the AP course for "pushing an agenda on our kids" which included "queer theory," intersectionality and abolishing prisons.


The press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis thanked "The View" co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin for issuing an apology over her erroneous claims about the Republican. (James Gilbert/Getty Images)


Farah Griffin worked in the Trump White House but has become one of the former president's fiercest critics. Her about-face on Trump helped her land the token conservative seat at "The View" in place of Meghan McCain, who left in 2021.

Farah Griffin frequently attacks her own party on the show and has been far less likely to clash with her left-wing co-hosts than McCain, whose tiffs with Joy Behar and Goldberg were a near-daily occurrence.