Donald Trump's desire to derail a possible 2024 presidential run by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) led him to trash his adopted home state of Florida earlier this week which led a leading conservative columnist to suggest that is evidence the former president will stop at nothing in his quest to get back into the Oval Office.
In his column for the National Review, senior writer Charles M. Cooke fired back at the former president and warned conservatives that if Trump is not stopped, he will cost them a shot at the presidency in 2024.
Getting right to the point, Cooke wrote, "Those on the American right who continue to doubt that Donald Trump will happily burn down anything that stands between himself and his desire to lose yet another election for the GOP would do well to note that, despite being engaged at present in nothing more consequential than a nascent shadow primary, he has already reached the point at which he is willing to sully the reputation of his home state of Florida in exchange for a mess of pottage."
Cooke's ire was aimed at the Florida bashing by Trump who wrote on Truth Social that Florida is "the worst in the Country” when it comes to “crime,” “Education, “Affordability,” and “COVID-19 Death," to which Cooke could only roll his eyes.
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Suggesting that it is "futile to begin debating facts" with Trump, Cooke made the case that, "There is a reason that 850 people per day now elect to move to Florida — a number that, in 2021, included a certain Donald J. Trump — and it is not that the state is an ignorant, crime-ridden, impossibly expensive hellhole. On the contrary: Life is pretty good here."
According to the columnist, there is no better time than now for Republicans to make a choice between the former resident who appears headed for another presidential loss of the future of the party that is being dragged down by him.
"if one cares solely about the cultish advancement of Donald Trump, it doesn’t especially matter that Trump is now criticizing precisely the sort of conservative governance that, at least in theory, he is promising that he’ll bring to Washington, D.C." he wrote. "If one cares about advancing conservative governance, however, it matters a great deal."
Addressing the fact that Trump chose to uproot himself and his family out of Manhattan to live at his Mar-a-Lago, Cooke wrote that is just more evidence of Trump's cynicism and deceit.
"As a rule, Americans do not move from places with 'out-of-control crime' to places with even more out-of-control crime, just as they do not choose to live in places with bad schools or move from cheap places to expensive places or get out of areas with stringent lockdowns to seek out the policies of 'a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.'" he wrote. "The notion is transparently, self-servingly, brazenly stupid — and all of us know it full well."
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