While the polls and the media are discounting the candidacy of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor is warning the polling leader Donald Trump is merely running on all the things he was unable to get done as president.
"If you promise you're going to do something, you should do it, but what's worse is he's now running in 2024 promising that, if he can get elected, he's going to sign an executive order on birthright citizenship, which he could have done for his first four years," DeSantis said in a Council Bluffs, Iowa, stump speech Saturday that aired live on Newsmax. "So you know, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
"We need the results. We need someone that's going to follow through. It's not about the bluster. It's not about all this other stuff. It's about actually delivering."
DeSantis admitted he agrees with much of Trump's policies, but he says his candidacy is "100%" on delivering unlike the GOP primary polling leader heading into Monday's first-in-the-nation caucus.
"I've delivered and I don't make promises that I don't intend to follow through on," DeSantis told his rally. "I mean, there's things I could promise that would sound good, you know, for a lot of Iowa caucusgoers that I know I wouldn't be able to do or accomplish and so I don't.
"I don't do that, because I want you to know when I'm saying things, I have a plan to actually bring it all into fruition."
Trump had the right positions to beat Democrats, but instead he empowered them, according to DeSantis.
"If you look, the left got stronger during his four years; he energized the left," DeSantis said. "They were notching big victories. I mean, Pelosi and Schumer ate his lunch on every single spending bill. That's why he added $7.8 trillion to the debt in four years."
Ignoring inflation, DeSantis noted "did more debt in four years than the first about 220 years of this country did."
"So don't tell me that he had any ability to control spending or to fight back against the big spenders," DeSantis continued.
DeSantis lumped many Republicans in the same boat as he did Trump, failing to deliver on big promises to cut spending.
"I'm so sick of these Republicans always saying they're going to do all these things, then they get into office and they either don't do it or they do the opposite," DeSantis said. "These Republicans in the U.S. Senate, you know, we have a big problem on our border.
"They want to send all this money overseas, and a lot of Republicans are like, 'Wait a minute, you have got to care more about your border than you do about foreign borders.' Let's stop the invasion of our own country first and foremost, and that's common sense."
The Trump administration had successes, but it ultimately led to President Joe Biden in office to bring back the failed policies of former President Barack Obama, DeSantis warned his Iowa rally.
"He was not able to defeat the left on any major issues," DeSantis continued. "He could be there and would prevent the left from doing everything they wanted with the government, which was good, obviously, but in terms of them taking over education, corporate America, all this stuff that went on, I mean, a lot of the wokeness we see in the military started under Obama, but it did continue under Trump.
"And I don't know that he necessarily supported it, I just don't think he had control over his cabinet secretaries. And so that was happening, and now on Biden, it's on steroids."
DeSantis vowed to drain the swamp far more than Trump was ever able to do.
"Trump said he'd drain the swamp, and I agreed with that," DeSantis said. "The problem is he didn't drain it. The bureaucracy got worse. The weaponization got worse. He put a lot of these people in place. I mean, Christopher Wray was appointed by Donald Trump to be the FBI director. He put [Anthony] Fauci in charge of the COVID response. He did a lot of this stuff for that, so the swamp got worse.
"The bureaucracy got more entrenched while he was president, and so I don't know that he'd have the ability to necessarily have any different outcomes.
"I mean, he had a chance to do it, and he didn't do it, and you have to be willing to fire people when you get in there. He had all these Obama holdovers that he kept in place, and like the National Security Council.
"I can tell you, I will take every Biden holdover and fire them on Day 1 as president. I don't want any of those folks there."
Most of DeSantis' attacks Saturday were aimed at Trump, but his chief polling challenger behind the leader, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, was not spared either.
"I had to debate the other night on CNN with Hillary, I mean, Nikki, and you know the issue is this: Look, like we all have records; I'm very proud of mine; you know, she's not as proud of hers, because she says that you're lying when you quote her words back to her," DeSantis said, regaling his rally about the main takeaway from this week's final Iowa debate before the caucus.
"You know, she wrote in her book in 2019 that Hillary Clinton inspired her to run for office. And she said that on video, and you can look the videos are out there. And now she's saying she never said that all this stuff.
"So I just don't understand that. I mean, like, if you've said it, just own it, or you can rationalize it, but don't act like people are just making this up."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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