Ron DeSantis Drops Out Of Presidential Race

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who entered the 2024 presidential race with a bankroll rivalling that of coup-attempting former President Donald Trump, dropped his bid for the Republican nomination on Sunday — and endorsed Trump on his way out.

“Nobody worked harder and we left it all out on the field,” DeSantis said in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, before going on to say, “If there was anything I could do to produce a favourable outcome ― more campaign stops, more interviews ― I would do it.”

“But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory. Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign.”

DeSantis then added that he was backing Trump over former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, the remaining major candidate in the race.

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said, adding, “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”

At a campaign stop in Seabrook, New Hampshire, Haley acknowledged DeSantis’ announcement.

“I want to say to Ron, he ran a great race. He’s been a good governor, and we wish him well. Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left,” she said.

The announcement comes just days after DeSantis claimed he had gotten his “ticket punched” to continue his campaign despite finishing a distant second to Trump in the Iowa caucuses. Late polls in that state showed that DeSantis could finish third behind Haley. When DeSantis ultimately finished just two percentage points ahead of her, he tried to spin it as a victory ― even though he had previously said he had to win Iowa to win the nomination.

DeSantis was polling even worse in New Hampshire and South Carolina than he had been in Iowa, and his campaign seemed uncertain of a strategy going forward. His first stop after Iowa was a campaign visit to South Carolina, a contest that is a full month after New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Tuesday. He was to return to New Hampshire on Friday, but then was planning to head back to South Carolina on Saturday.

Republicans who feared Trump could not win a general election, particularly wealthy party donors, had initially lined up behind DeSantis after his nearly 20%-point reelection as governor in November 2022. That star power allowed him to continue collecting donations of unlimited size in a state account and eventually transfer more than $80 million into a federal super PAC created to support him.

But DeSantis’ high point in the campaign turned out to be just after that reelection victory, when some polls showed him actually ahead of Trump for the 2024 nomination.

That began to change quickly. Trump entered the race just weeks after those midterm elections and soon began attacking DeSantis in speeches, online and even in television ads.

DeSantis chose not to enter the race himself until the end of Florida’s legislative session in May, by which point he was polling only in the 20s both nationally and in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The poor polling resulted in weaker fundraising, which resulted in two rounds of staff layoffs and shakeups ― even though much of the logistical work of the campaign was effectively outsourced to the relatively flush Never Back Down super PAC.

An even bigger problem for DeSantis, though, may have been something even the best fundraising could do nothing about: his personality. Longtime Florida Republicans told HuffPost a year ago that DeSantis has never seemed to enjoy interacting with people.

That trait, as it turns out, became a major liability in a primary race that still places a high value on personal interactions with primary voters in the early voting states.

“His problem is that the more people see him, the less they like him,” said one influential New Hampshire Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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Ron DeSantis Backs Pardoning Trump If Elected President

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is now promising that if he’s elected president in 2024, he’ll pardon Donald Trump if the former president, who is facing 91 felony charges in four indictments, has been convicted.

The Republican presidential candidate, during a stop in Iowa, declared that he “already said that long ago” when questioned about whether he’d pardon the Republican nomination’s front-runner.

“I think we’ve got to move on as a country and, you know, like Ford did to Nixon, because the divisions are not in the country’s interest,” said DeSantis, adding that he “said that months ago” when asked about pardoning the former president.

A DeSantis campaign spokesperson responded simply “Correct” when asked by NBC News on Saturday to clarify if the Florida governor was committing to granting Trump a presidential pardon.

DeSantis’ recent remarks about the former president arrive months after he was asked whether he’d look at potentially pardoning Trump supporters convicted in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and Trump himself, whose charges include attempting to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents taken from the White House when he left office.

“On day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who are people, who are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” he said in May on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” a right-wing talk radio program.

“I would say any example of disfavoured treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big,” he said on the radio show.

In July, he said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” that he’s “going to do what’s right for the country,” adding that he didn’t think it’d be “good for the country to have an almost 80-year-old former president go to prison.”

“It doesn’t seem like it would be a good thing,” he continued, citing a pardon decision he deemed a historic mistake.

“And I look at, like, you know, Ford pardoned Nixon, took some heat for it, but at the end of the day, it’s like, do we want to move forward as a country?” Gerald Ford, who had been been Nixon’s vice president, pardoned him after Nixon resigned in 1974 amid the Watergate investigation, elevating Ford to the presidency.

Other 2024 Republican candidates have also weighed in on the pardon question, including former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who sided with doing “what’s in the best interest of the country,” and Ohio biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who vowed he would pardon Trump as a first act as president.

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Chris Christie Taunts Trump With The ‘One Thing He Cannot Stand’

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie boasted that he’s living “rent-free” inside Donald Trump’s head after the former president launched another attack on him.

Trump on Tuesday fired off a rant on his Truth Social website saying Christie “SHOULD DROP OUT OF THE RACE.”

Christie, one of a number of candidates running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said that won’t happen.

“He only wishes I was going away,” Christie said, saying Trump was “obviously” watching as he criticised the former president on TV when he posted that message.

“I was laying out the truth about him,” Christie said, saying the “one thing he cannot stand” is when someone credible calls him out.

“He knows I’m not just some politician talking about his problems. I’m someone who’s done it, and done it well,” Christie said, noting his 130 wins and zero losses in prosecuting political corruption cases when he was a U.S. attorney.

“I know how deep his problems are, and how much they’re damaging both the Republican Party and the country,” Christie said. “I’m not getting out this race. Maybe he should think about getting out of the race since he’ll be spending most of March and half of April in a courtroom in Washington, DC.”

That’s a reference to the March 4 start of Trump’s election interference trial, one of four criminal cases against the former president.

Christie is polling in the low-to-mid single digits, far behind Trump and behind a number of other candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy and former United States Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Yet the former president seems to devote outsized attention to Christie, frequently responding to his TV appearances by attacking him on social media despite the fact that the two were once close allies.

In 2016, Christie became one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse Trump, and remained a loyal insider for the duration of Trump’s presidency, but turned into a critic afterward.

See his full conversation with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins below:

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Twitter Users Are Sceptical About Ron DeSantis’ Abortion Anecdote At Debate

At least four of the eight candidates on stage falsely claimed that people are getting abortions up until birth. But the Florida governor went a little further.

DeSantis claimed to know a woman named “Penny” who he said “survived multiple abortion attempts” and “was left discarded in a pan.”

He added: “Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different hospital.”

DeSantis then declared that Republicans “are not going to allow abortion all the way up ’til birth,” referring to something that, again, is not actually happening to begin with, no matter what Republican politicians desperate for primary voters might say.

Many people on social media were sceptical that DeSantis’ story is true and that his good friend Penny even exists.

HuffPost reached out to the DeSantis campaign to ask about the governor’s friendship with Penny and whether they would make her available for interviews, but no one immediately responded.

DeSantis may have been referring to an anti-abortion rights activist from Michigan named Miriam “Penny” Hopper, who has claimed she was born in 1955 at 23 weeks old after her parents decided to have an abortion.

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Trump Blasts DeSantis For Daring To Run For President: ‘He Should Have Waited’

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis should have waited his turn to run for president, and ridiculed his main 2024 rival’s lack of charisma.

Trump told an audience in Windham, New Hampshire, that DeSantis made a mistake by challenging him for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

“What he did wrong is he should have waited until ’28,” Trump said. “But I don’t know if that would have held water, because eventually they would have figured out — you know, you do need some personality if you’re going to be a politician.”

The former president added that he was disappointed when DeSantis launched his 2024 campaign. Trump claimed he was responsible for DeSantis’ 2018 election as governor, and said DeSantis showed disloyalty by using his easy gubernatorial reelection last year as a springboard for a presidential campaign.

“That’s why I’ve been particularly hard on him, and fortunately it’s worked because he’s crashing,” Trump bragged.

DeSantis’ struggling campaign announced a shake-up on Tuesday in an effort to restore momentum for his White House bid. He replaced his campaign manager with his gubernatorial office chief of staff James Uthmeier. This follows the firing of a third of his campaign staff amid fundraising setbacks.

DeSantis has been trailing the former president by over 36 points in an average of national polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight.

The two leading Republicans could face off at the first GOP primary debate set for later this month in Milwaukee. However, Trump has threatened to skip the debate to avoid elevating his rivals.

DeSantis has been preparing for the event and hired an experienced debate coach, Brett O’Donnell, to help him, according to ABC News.

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Mehdi Hasan Spots ‘Devastating’ News For Ron DeSantis’ Presidential Hopes

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said a new poll should be considered “funeral rites” for Republicans hoping to defeat Donald Trump in next year’s presidential primary.

And it’s especially bad news for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has been the former president’s chief rival.

“Simply put, it’s done,” Hasan said on Monday evening. “If you had any doubts that this is Trump’s race and Trump’s race to lose, this poll will clear things up for you.”

The New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday shows Trump leading DeSantis by 37 percentage points and ahead by 31 points in a one-on-one matchup. No other candidate pulled more than 3% support. (The poll of 932 likely Republican primary voters was conducted from July 23 to 27.)

DeSantis has made “fighting wokeness” his signature issue, but Hasan noted that Trump polls ahead of him even on that topic.

“Not even close,” Hasan said.

The poll also shows that Trump has sealed his control over the GOP as most Republican voters are unswayed by the criminal charges against the former president.

Overall, just 17% of Republicans polled said they believed Trump had committed a crime. Among “MAGA” Republicans, that number is 0%.

“Oh, it’s not a cult,” Hasan said sarcastically.

See his full analysis below:

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New Poll Shows Trump Squashing 2024 Republican Competition By A Landslide

Among likely GOP primary voters, the former president is commanding 54% support and leads his nearest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by a whopping 37 percentage points.

His other challengers, including his onetime running mate, former Vice President Mike Pence, are all polling at low single digits.

Trump outperformed other candidates by large margins in nearly every single demographic polled. DeSantis especially floundered among the Republicans’ most influential demographics, earning only 9% support among voters 65 and older. Even if all other candidates dropped out, the poll found, Trump would still be poised to beat DeSantis 62 to 31.

Monday’s poll further cements the results of previous ones. Last week, a Monmouth University poll found that nearly 7 in 10 GOP voters believe Trump is either “definitely” or “probably” the party’s strongest candidate to unseat President Joe Biden.

Trump’s success in the polls comes despite his legal troubles. In March, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him over a $130,000 hush money payment made to the porn star Stormy Daniels, who alleges the two had an affair, shortly before the 2016 election. Then, last month, a federal grand jury indicted Trump after an investigation found he took highly classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida.

Monday’s poll comes about three weeks ahead of the first Republican debate in Milwaukee and about six months out from the Iowa Republican caucuses.

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Ex-RNC Chair Hits Republicans With A Harsh Truth About 2024

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele has issued a stark reality check for anti-Donald Trump Republicans.

“I will repeat once again, for all those who think otherwise, Donald Trump will be the nominee of this party until someone decides that they’re prepared to lose this primary in order to win a general election and beat Joe Biden,” Steele warned on Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Beat.”

“That clamoring sound you hear is the donor and establishment political class saying we need someone in this race now,” Steele said later in the interview, but he then added: “My submission to all of them is, ‘Y’all too late. Y’all too late.’”

Steele said that, had he still been at the RNC, he would have gotten members to decide which one candidate they wanted to back to go after Trump and then put all resources behind them.

The party “has leverage” to shape the outcome, he said, but currently isn’t using it amid Trump’s rising in the polls and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) faltering campaign launch.

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Ron DeSantis Is About To Run For President. Andrew Warren Has A Warning.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Of all the places Andrew Warren imagined his career would take him, it was never here: the lobby of an upscale chain hotel in downtown Montgomery, huddling with his legal team and preparing for a hearing that — maybe within a year if he’s lucky — will result in him getting his job back.

“I didn’t ask to be the tip of the spear in this fight for freedom and democracy,” Warren said, settling into a tall wingback chair on the morning of May 2, several hours before he was due in a federal appellate court just down the street. “But the governor picked a fight with me, so I’m fighting on behalf of everyone who cares about these issues.”

It has been over nine months since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Warren, accusing the twice-elected Democratic prosecutor for Hillsborough County of “incompetence” and “neglect of duty” in a scathing 29-page executive order last August. The Florida Constitution gives the governor the power to remove elected officials in cases of extreme misconduct. But those powers have rarely, if ever, been used in a case like Warren’s.

“This is something you’d expect to see happen in Turkey or North Korea or China. This is not something you’d ever expect to see happen in the United States,” said Warren, whose general measured demeanor during our interview sometimes gave way to a quiet rage about the whole episode.

“The governor is the one who did wrong here,” Warren told me, “and no one else should have to adjust their behavior to the whims of the dictator.”

Frothing with the polite but pointed anger of a clean-cut attorney, Warren described the surreal events of the past year, which has included: Learning of his suspension in the middle of grand jury proceedings for a decades-old cold case. Being escorted from his office with his belongings by armed sheriff’s deputies. Watching the governor brag about his suspension on Fox News. Reading about his suspension in the governor’s book. Hearing about his suspension in the governor’s stump speeches. Reliving this episode of his life over and over again — in court, in interviews, in conversations with friends and strangers. Having his career and life essentially frozen. Receiving death threats against his family because of the bright spotlight that DeSantis put him under.

“This has been very difficult for me professionally,” said Warren, who is still living with his family in Tampa, “because I care so much about the office. It’s been very difficult for me politically, because the most powerful Republican in the country is targeting me specifically, as an individual. And it’s been very difficult for me personally ― everything from just the huge disruption it’s had on my life with my family, to getting death threats from people who tell me that my children deserve to die for the things I’ve done.”

DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, suspended Warren last August for what he characterized as "neglect of duty."
DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, suspended Warren last August for what he characterized as “neglect of duty.”

Associated Press

In his lawsuit, now winding its way through federal courts and currently being heard by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here in Montgomery, Warren argues that DeSantis violated his constitutional right to free speech and removed him without cause. It will likely be decided as DeSantis is running for president on his record of governing “the free state of Florida.”

DeSantis is expected to announce his campaign for the Republican nomination in the coming days. He has already made Warren’s firing a staple of his stump speech, using the episode to show how he’s crushed foes using his executive fist. “[These state attorneys] want to weaponize the power of their office to target people they don’t like,” DeSantis said last month in Manchester, New Hampshire. “And when we had an attorney like that, a district attorney in Tampa who had been funded by [George] Soros and said he would not uphold the laws of the state, I removed him from his post. He’s gone.”

Warren was never bankrolled by Soros, the Democratic mega-donor who is a perennial target of conspiracies and hate on the right — but he likely benefited from contributions Soros made to the Florida Democratic Party at one point or another. DeSantis, perhaps projecting, also misrepresented the argument he used to fire Warren, who has never been accused, in either the executive order suspending him or in subsequent court filings, of going after people he didn’t like.

The governor’s office, which generally only interacts with certain friendly news outlets, never responded to a request from HuffPost to provide a comment for this article.

Warren has taken his battle against DeSantis to the courts, hoping the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will rule in his favor.
Warren has taken his battle against DeSantis to the courts, hoping the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will rule in his favor.

Chasity Maynard/Tallahassee Democrat via AP

Although it’s easier to describe Warren as having been removed or fired, he’s technically in a state of suspension that could be reversed — or made permanent — pending a hearing by the Florida Senate. But given the heavy Republican makeup of that body, Warren is exploring other remedies.

Warren’s suspension came two months after he co-signed a letter with more than 80 other progressive prosecutors opposing the criminalization of abortion and transgender health care, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights. In his executive order, DeSantis cited both the letter and what he characterized as a “blanket refusal” to prosecute some low-level crimes, such as the aggressive ticketing of Tampa bicyclists, most of whom were Black. Warren disputes that his office had “blanket” policies that endangered public safety, as DeSantis tried to argue in his order — and his case hinges on whether a panel of majority-conservative appellate judges see it the same way.

“The governor has his talking points, which are divorced from reality. From the day I was suspended, I said this was a publicity stunt, the allegations are false, this is un-American,” said Warren, on the edge of his seat, his legal team hovering nearby.

A trim 46-year-old with light salt-and-pepper hair, Warren sometimes doesn’t blink when he’s talking. During an interview, he comes off as a deeply focused person who has spent the last nine months of his life consumed by two overlapping objectives — getting his job back and sounding the alarm on DeSantis, whom he sees as a threat to democracy. “Powerful people without a moral compass are dangerous,” Warren said. “Politicians who are willing to break the law to get votes or to get applause are dangerous.”

Politics aside, however, the two men have, if not a lot, at least some major things in common. They are both Florida natives in their mid-40s. They followed similar paths into public service after graduating from elite law schools (Warren from Columbia, DeSantis from Harvard). As young lawyers, they both worked for the Justice Department as federal prosecutors. And they’ve both confronted family tragedies in recent years ― Warren, after his pregnant wife was involved in a car crash and the couple lost their baby, and DeSantis, after his wife was diagnosed and underwent treatment for breast cancer.

Their paths diverged dramatically once DeSantis became a congressman and joined the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, and Warren, having moved from Washington to Tampa to raise his family, decided to challenge a longtime GOP incumbent for state attorney.

The job of chief law enforcement officer, by its very nature, relies heavily on the discretion of the individuals doing the job to determine how crimes are prosecuted and sentenced. That’s why Warren’s case is so tricky and precedent-setting. It’s also why, in nearly every state, prosecutors are locally elected and therefore not subject to the political whims of a faraway official — the same principle behind a governor not picking the members of your city council or school board.

DeSantis isn’t the only Florida governor who has kneecapped a prosecutor. Sen. Rick Scott, the Republican who preceded DeSantis, got a judge to allow him to reassign murder cases from an Orlando prosecutor who was opposed to using the death penalty. But Scott didn’t try to get that prosecutor fired. “When I was there I was very clear — you have to prosecute your cases,” Scott told HuffPost, declining to comment on what’s happening now between DeSantis and Warren.

"Politicians who are willing to break the law to get votes or to get applause are dangerous,” Warren said.
“Politicians who are willing to break the law to get votes or to get applause are dangerous,” Warren said.

OCTAVIO JONES for HuffPost

Warren came into office in 2016 after upsetting a longtime Republican in the purple west-central Florida county that encompasses Tampa, the state’s third-largest city. He says his backers were both Republicans and Democrats drawn to his mission of more equitable criminal justice outcomes amid a national reckoning over police brutality. Accusing his opponent of being too heavy-handed when the times demanded the opposite, Warren won a surprise victory followed four years later by his reelection to a second term.

At a time when Florida Democrats are desperately trying to build their bench, Warren has been floated as a possible U.S. Senate candidate against Scott in 2024. His close friend Nikki Fried, the newly elected chair of the Florida Democratic Party, told HuffPost that Warren would make a great candidate for any number of Republican-held positions that Democrats are hoping to contest. “He’s a true leader with a big heart, and unfortunately in politics right now you don’t find a lot of those,” Fried said.

Warren can also raise money. While he declined to give an exact figure, he said he’s brought in “several hundred thousand” dollars through a nonprofit for his legal defense.

But Warren isn’t interested in another office, at least not right now. “It’s wonderful to have people who are so confident in your leadership to encourage you to run for different positions,” he said. “But my focus is on the state attorney’s job.”

Running statewide in Florida won’t be easy for any Democrat. So far, no serious candidates have emerged to challenge Scott in what was once a Senate battleground. A bellwether for these times, Warren’s own swing county, Hillsborough, lurched to the right in the last election, shedding several Democratic officeholders.

DeSantis cites his own blowout reelection last year to justify the heavy leverage of his executive powers. The governor has single-handedly spearheaded measures such as banning transgender medical therapy for minors and expanding the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law into high schools. He also amped up his feud with a beloved American corporation that happens to be one of his state’s largest taxpayers. DeSantis wears these battles as a badge of honor. “My view is simple,” he told an audience last month at Liberty University, uttering a line that’s become a staple of his speeches and the overriding ethos of his governorship. “I may have earned 50% of the vote, but that entitled me to wield 100% of the executive power.”

DeSantis might even be going after another Democratic prosecutor. Monique Worrell, Orlando’s state attorney, said this month that she believes DeSantis is building a case to target her next, accusing the governor of seeking to “exploit his political agenda against me.”

Fried, Florida’s former agriculture commissioner and the last Democrat elected statewide, said DeSantis has created a climate of fear in Florida.

“We’ve got a governor who believes he’s the ultimate ruler of the state. He’s taking away people’s freedom of speech and he’s removing officers who have been elected by their constituents at the local level,” she said.

Warren prepares for a TV interview at his home in Tampa.
Warren prepares for a TV interview at his home in Tampa.

The Washington Post via Getty Images

Warren’s best shot at reversing his suspension lies with the appellate court, which is reviewing his challenge to an earlier ruling from a federal judge in Florida. This ruling was both good and bad for Warren — good in that it seemed to generally side with Warren that DeSantis violated his free speech and removed him from office without citing “even a hint of misconduct”; bad because despite all that, the judge still found he didn’t have the constitutional authority to restore Warren as a local prosecutor.

Documents unearthed in discovery support the argument that DeSantis doled out a punishment driven overwhelmingly by his political agenda. An early version of the executive order made numerous references to Soros, the political lightning rod, which DeSantis ultimately struck out with a blue marker. Beyond that, the governor’s attorney struggled to build a case showing that Warren had undermined public safety, according to a New York Times analysis of the discovery documents.

That didn’t stop DeSantis from declaring, in an Aug. 4 press conference announcing the suspension, that Warren’s tenure had been “devastating to the rule of law.” He made similar comments that night to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Tucker, you’ve documented the destruction that we’ve seen with these Soros prosecutors around the county, where they basically take it upon themselves to determine which laws should be followed and which laws should not be followed,” a grinning DeSantis said, with photos of Warren proceeding to flash across the screen.

Warren disputes that his policies had any negative impact on crime, noting that, by the state of Florida’s own crime reporting metrics, overall crime declined in Hillsborough County under his watch. “This isn’t a Portland or San Francisco scenario,” he said.

Republicans blame soft-on-crime policies, and the “woke” district attorneys they say promote them, for the visible homelessness and addiction in places like Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, an idea that’s been relentlessly reinforced by conservative media. I asked Warren to define a “woke prosecutor,” and he didn’t know where to begin. In general, the term has become a catchall on the right for anything deemed too liberal or politically correct. “You have to ask the people on Fox News [what it means],” Warren said. “I’m a moderate prosecutor from a moderate county. I have done things that have frustrated the far left as much as the far right.”

Warren’s suspension was a direct result of DeSantis’ war on “woke,” his attorneys argue, a pretext the governor has used to go after schools, government agencies and businesses in a way that Democrats, at least, find chilling.

“The animus here toward woke ideas and woke viewpoints was a motivating factor,” Warren’s attorney David O’Neill argued to the appellate panel. Republicans have made the word so pervasive that it’s being used now in a deadly serious manner in federal courts.

DeSantis was represented in Montgomery by two young attorneys for the state of Florida who returned to a single, much-examined line in the abortion rights letter that Warren signed last June. The sentence in question seems to signal, beyond just the general opposition to the criminalization of abortion, that the co-signers would go a step further and refuse to prosecute abortion crimes altogether. Warren, as far as he knows, is the only prosecutor from the letter who lost his job over this single sentence.

In the chaotic and emotional days that followed the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling and the letter’s release, Warren said he attempted to clarify that he didn’t mean he would disregard abortion law in its entirety. At the time, Florida lawmakers had just passed a 15-week abortion ban. Since then, they’ve passed a six-week ban, which DeSantis put his signature on last month but hasn’t said much about since.

“The governor has made it clear that if he disagrees with who you are or what you said or what you stand for, then you’re at risk for being attacked,” Warren said.
“The governor has made it clear that if he disagrees with who you are or what you said or what you stand for, then you’re at risk for being attacked,” Warren said.

Octavio Jones for HuffPost

Warren can expect a ruling sometime within the next year. It may not be the ruling he’s hoping for.

The appellate panel is composed of three judges: one Democratic appointee and two Republicans, including a Trump nominee. And beyond this panel of judges in Alabama, there are only dead ends — the Republican-controlled Florida Senate and equally conservative Florida Supreme Court — underscoring how entrenched Republicans have become in Florida under DeSantis and throughout the age of Donald Trump.

Warren, who might violate the terms of his suspension if he were to take another legal job, has had a lot of downtime to reflect on this battle and what it all means. For himself and his future. For Florida. For the country, if DeSantis beats both Trump and Joe Biden and tries to run the federal government like the state of Florida — which he’s promised to do.

“The governor has made it clear that if he disagrees with who you are or what you said or what you stand for, then you’re at risk for being attacked,” Warren said. “I mean, look at the people he’s gone after. Disney, obviously. The Special Olympics. He’s attacked businesses. He’s attacked teachers. He’s attacking the LGBTQ community. He’s attacked universities and professors and boards of regents. He’s attacked elected officials. If you don’t say what he wants you to say, then you are at risk.”

My final question for Warren was whether he regrets signing the abortion letter — after all, had he not, he might still be employed. Would he risk this all over again? Or would he try to find another, less out-there way to signal his opposition to the abortion climate? Warren shifted uncomfortably in his seat. For the first time in our conversation he became a little less lawyerly and a little more pissed, channeling, in a certain sense, his nemesis.

“Your question to me is — should I have done something differently and not spoken my mind so as not to annoy the governor of Florida? Should I not have exercised my constitutional right to free speech? So I didn’t run the risk of the governor breaking state and federal law?” he said. “Americans don’t need permission slips to exercise their constitutional rights. No, I wouldn’t change a thing, and I shouldn’t have to change a thing.”

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Ron DeSantis Praises Kemi Badenoch For Her War On ‘Woke Ideology’

Hardline US presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has praised Kemi Badenoch for her fight against so-called “woke ideology”.

The Florida governor met the business secretary on a trip to Britain ahead of a potential run against Donald Trump to be the next Republican candidate.

He singled out Badenoch for her views on Britain’s cultural debates, during an interview with The Sunday Telegraph.

The paper claimed his allies hope that Badenoch could be the next Margaret Thatcher to their new Ronald Reagan.

DeSantis praised the senior Tory, who is also minister for women and equalities, for her outspoken views.

He described “woke ideology” as “a war on the truth”, telling the paper: “When institutions get infected by woke ideology, it really corrupts the institutions.

“We look at woke infiltrating schools as a problem, woke infiltrating bureaucracies as a problem and woke infiltrating corporate America as a problem. We say that Florida is where woke goes to die.”

DeSantis said Badenoch “complimented what we are doing in Florida” and added: “I commend her and her efforts to make sure that this is not corrupting British society.”

In a post on Twitter following the meeting, DeSantis said she is such a “strong, outspoken leader in the United Kingdom”.

“We share the same goal of spurring economic growth for our people and I look forward to continuing our relationship,” he added.

DeSantis has not announced his intention to run for the Republican nomination but is widely expected to do so.

In his interview, he also addressed speculation over his potential run at the White House, telling the paper: “I’m going to go through our legislative session, get the people’s business done. I’m still in the midst of that.

“I’ve got about another week or so of that, and then I have the Budget and everything. I’m not going to make any decision before then.

“But the end of that time is coming, it’s closer now than it was six months ago. So just stay tuned.”

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