Leaving aside Donald Trump's main legal troubles, the former president starts the 2024 campaign in an enviable position as the front-runner with a commanding 30.8 percent lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in the most recent Real Clear Politics polling average.
But if, for some reason, the former president doesn’t win the nomination, Democrats won’t have to change their playbook much.
That’s according to new reporting from Politico that describes behind-the-scenes efforts Democrats are making to prepare to face a candidate other than Trump in the general election.
Jonathan Lemire writes, "While not all Republicans can be directly tied to some of Trump’s record, or his role in inspiring the Jan. 6 riot, Biden aides still believe they can be lashed to the former president. DNC staffers have begun branding all Republican hopefuls as enablers of MAGA policies, making their support of Trump a throughline.”
Democratic strategist Basil Smikle told Politico that his party would try to depict anyone other than Trump who wins the nomination as “Trump Lite.”
“Nearly all of them have supported him before. The White House can also make the large umbrella case that the GOP are threats to democracy itself and the protection of personal liberties.”
Politico reports that DNC aides are conducting background research on all declared candidates and some potential candidates, such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Lemire writes, "Democrats believe that while a moderate Republican might prove a more serious general election opponent, others who may enter the race — like— stand little chance of surviving a GOP primary electorate that has moved decisively to the right.”
The Biden campaign believes that regardless of who wins the Republican nomination, the GOP is likely to roll out the same attacks on the president, including his age, the controversy surrounding his son Hunter Biden and attempts to brand Democrats as socialists – the same attacks that didn’t work in 2020.
But the Biden campaign’s focus remains on the former president.
“The White House likes its chances in a rematch,” Lemire writes.
“Aides believe Trump’s behavior is disqualifying for voters and that many Americans would not like a return to the chaos that dominated his administration. Moreover, Biden’s political brain trust is fixated on the independent, swing voters — in many cases, suburban women — who went for Trump in 2016 but broke hard away from him four years later.”
Former Republican Gov. Robert Bentley and Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman, both of Alabama, came together to pen a warning in the Washington Post last week imploring change over the death penalty. With 167, the state has more people on death row than any other per capita.
They called it "146 people too many."
"As former Alabama governors, we have come over time to see the flaws in our nation’s justice system and to view the state’s death penalty laws in particular as legally and morally troubling," the governors wrote. "We both presided over executions while in office, but if we had known then what we know now about prosecutorial misconduct, we would have exercised our constitutional authority to commute death sentences to life."
They cited data from the Death Penalty Information Center, which counted that for every 8.3 executions, there has been one person exonerated since 1976. It means they're putting people to death who weren't guilty about 12 percent of the time. Applying those statistics to Alabama means as many as 20 people shouldn't be there and were wrongfully convicted.
"The center has found that wrongful convictions are 'overwhelmingly the product of police or prosecutorial misconduct or the presentation of knowingly false testimony.' Judge Alex Kozinski, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, has said the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors is an 'epidemic' in the United States. Shamefully, such misconduct most frequently involves Black defendants (87 percent)," the column explained.
The governors cited one person in Alabama that has been exonerated, but they said there are more convictions that lawmakers should find concerning. They went so far as to say that those convictions should "haunt Alabama leaders."
"In 1998, a non-unanimous jury recommended death for Toforest Johnson for the killing of an off-duty sheriff’s deputy based on the testimony of someone who, unknown to the defense, was later paid a $5,000 reward," they recalled. "The case of Rocky Myers, convicted of murdering his neighbor, is even more disturbing. Myers was never connected to the murder scene, and even though the jury recommended life without parole, the judge overrode the recommendation and ordered his execution."
Siegelman mentioned Freddie Wright, who he could have commuted in 2000, but didn't. He said it haunts him. After 23 years, he's fairly certain that Wright was wrongfully charged, prosecuted, and convicted for a murder he likely didn't commit.
They also cited a 1976 Supreme Court ruling that opened the door for prosecutors to use grand juries to get convictions without any accountability for themselves. The joke has always been that a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich. It's not far off, as the governors cite close to a 99 percent indictment rate.
They described the "stealth setting" as a place without a judge or defense lawyers overseeing what prosecutors are doing. It gives them free rein to provide false evidence or testimony and withhold any evidence they want to get the conviction. The District Attorneys prosecutors work for are political officials, meaning their success rate becomes a campaign talking point. Convictions are seen as doing a good job.
Before the Supreme Court made that ruling, there were about 200,000 people that were incarcerated. After the 1976 ruling, it shot up to 1.6 million.
"In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that a unanimous verdict is required to convict someone of a capital crime warranting death. The court highlighted the racist underpinnings of non-unanimous verdicts as a Jim Crow practice dating from the 1870s," the governors explained.
"Alabama had been the only state to allow a person to be sentenced to death by this legal relic and has 115 people scheduled to die based on non-unanimous jury verdicts."
Under the guise of being "tough on crime," Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) recently signed a law allowing someone put to death in Florida on a jury vote of 8-4.
Alabama has banned judicial overrides, which allowed judges to bypass the jury and give whatever sentence they wanted. In the state, 7 percent of death sentences were from these kinds of judicial overrides. When the law was signed, it didn't help the 31 people on death row in the state that were already there because of the practice.
The men closed by saying that 146 people on death row in Alabama are there due to split juries or judicial overrides.
"We missed our chance to confront the death penalty and have lived to regret it, but it is not too late for today’s elected officials to do the morally right thing," they closed.
Far-right activist, conspiracy theorist, and die-hard Donald Trump supporter Laura Loomer took aim at the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this Saturday, suggesting in a tweet that Casey DeSantis faked her struggle with breast cancer.
“DeSantis supporters say you aren’t allowed to criticize Jill DeSantis because she claims she had cancer (I’ve never seen the medical records), but they have no problem attacking Melania Trump,” Loomer wrote, calling the Florida First Lady by her birth name. “Personally, I think Jill’s health has been over exaggerated in a desperate effort to get votes for DeSantis. They even used it in a 2022 campaign commercial which is very tacky.”
“They are welcome to release the medical records though to show that they aren’t exaggerating,” she continued in her tweet. “Especially since they want to use her as a campaign surrogate and cancer as a way to appeal to voters. You can’t say ‘my wife is a part of my campaign’ then also say ‘you aren’t allowed to criticize her because she had cancer.'”
Casey DeSantis was declared breast cancer-free in January of last year and completed her final chemotherapy treatment. She was first diagnosed in October of 2021. But Loomer, a known conspiracy theorist, is claiming, without evidence, that her health struggles have been “exaggerated.”
“She’s fair game,” Loomer declared in her tweet.
Loomer, a former congressional candidate who rose to prominence in alt-right circles as a vocal anti-Muslim activist, is also a prolific spreader of conspiracy theories, once claiming that ISIS was behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis vowed during a Monday interview with Fox & Friends to "destroy leftism" if he defeats President Joe Biden in next year's presidential election. DeSantis launched his White House campaign last week and is widely viewed as former President Donald Trump's top competitor for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
"Most of the people that support you probably voted for President Trump twice. And the first comment I hear over and over again is, 'Why doesn't Ron DeSantis wait for President Trump's second term and then run?' And what is your best answer to that? Why is right now the time for Ron DeSantis to run for president?" host Will Cain asked.
"Because" DeSantis boasted, "everyone knows if I'm the nominee, I will beat Biden, uh, and I will serve two terms and I will be able to, uh, destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last year essentially conducted a takeover of the New College of Florida with the aim of transforming it into a right-wing educational institution on par with Hillsdale College in Michigan.
However, Vice News reports that many current students at New College aren't going down without a fight and have been organizing a "resistance" to what they call DeSantis' plan to "destroy our school."
As part of this, they organized an "alternate" graduation ceremony where they could celebrate as they saw fit -- and it attracted 90 of this year's 119 graduating students.
“It's the goal to graduate on our terms,” a student named Kacie told Vice. “The school they want to create is not the one students have been going to.”
LGBTQ students say they've felt particularly targeted by DeSantis, which is why they made sure their graduation ceremony featured ample rainbow and pink-and-blue flags.
And Vice notes that this alternate graduation ceremony is just one of many events students have organized to protest against DeSantis.
"While DeSantis’ efforts would make New College less tolerant, students at the school have defied him by hosting inclusive chess tournaments, dances, garage sales, rallies, and, of course, protests," the publication writes. "In February, about 300 students and parents, some dressed in Handmaid’s Tale outfits, protested a board meeting held by the new right-wing administration."
"The fact is we are incredibly resilient students. We are queer students living in Florida," Kacie explained to Vice. "We have survived through this before and we're going to continue surviving through it."
Walt Disney’s scrapping of a $900 million development in Florida has derailed other major real-estate projects that are already underway, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The company canceled plans for office space and the relocation of 2,000 workers from California earlier this month amid a brutal feud with Florida’s governor and Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis.
The planned office park in Orlando had been a central part of an 11,000-acre planned community – and Disney's cancellation has put the whole development in jeopardy, the Journal reported.
Disney’s development would have taken up 60 acres of an 11,000-acre planned community called Lake Nona that's being built by Tavistock Development Co. Many of the other commercial and residential projects – as well as other housing developments in the Orlando area – had planned on the influx of Disney workers.
More than 2,100 apartments have been built since Disney announced it was moving – compared to only 750 in the three years before, according to the Journal. Construction of another 1,200 was planned.
“Its pullout could contribute to a glut of homes in the community,” the Journal reported.
The Lake Nona development also includes restaurants and a hotel, which had banked on Disney bringing in business.
Disney “would have been a transformational development project for Lake Nona,” said Lisa McNatt, a market analytics expert based in Orlando.
“It would have resulted in a strong uptick in higher-income jobs that could have benefited the Orlando area at large.”
The fight between Disney and DeSantis started when Disney criticized a Florida law that bars classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity. Several lawsuits have been filed since, with Disney accusing DeSantis of retaliation.
Scientists have been warning that as climate change accelerates, Florida will be hit especially hard — from hurricanes and floods to rising sea levels. Increasing insurance rates are a symptom of Florida's climate woes; WUSF-FM (a National Public Radio affiliate in Tampa) reported that Florida homeowners can expect their property insurance rates to increase by 40 percent in 2023 even though they are already paying almost three times the national average.
But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is seeking the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, is as much of a climate change denier as his main competitor in the primary: former President Donald Trump.
Oliver Milman, in a report published by The Guardian on May 28, notes that DeSantis has dismissed climate science as "the politicization of the weather" and "left-wing stuff"; denies that climate change had anything to do with Hurricane Ian's severity, and is a strident promoter of fossil fuels. DeSantis often mocks green energy as "woke."
Pete Maysmith, the League of Conservation Voters' senior vice-president of campaigns, told The Guardian, "The cost of taking his anti-climate record to the national stage as president would be catastrophic. DeSantis has already made clear he would unleash his war on climate science, clean energy jobs, and strong pollution safeguards against clean air and clean water."
But not all conservatives are climate change deniers. Former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-South Carolina) believes that DeSantis is missing a golden opportunity by failing to tackle climate change from the right.
The former GOP congressman told The Guardian, "He could've been the post-Trump successful governor, the solver of problems. But instead, he's choosing to be more of the anti-woke warrior than Trump. He's slugging it out in the Trump lane, which is really a terrible mistake…. He could've said, 'Hey, we are dealing with this climate issue in Florida. Let's lead the world on this.' Instead, he's trying to out-Trump Trump."
CNN's data analyst dived into some polling for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to closely examine why the GOP presidential candidate isn't connecting well with voters.
DeSantis spent over a month traveling the early primary states claiming to promote his new book. At the beginning of March, DeSantis was just 15 points down from Trump, according to FiveThirtyEight. After the tour, DeSantis is 30 points down.
Meanwhile, Trump was shoring up endorsements from Florida members of the U.S. Congress and local legislature under DeSantis' feet. He was also poking DeSantis both personally and using his past votes to cut Social Security and Medicare.
"DeSantis has a bit of a 'lovability' problem among Republican voters," the analysis explains.
Questions about "strongly favorable" or "very favorable" essentially chart candidates' support among their most hardnosed Republican supporters. Donald Trump has a lot of those (50 percent), an April Fox News poll said. In Dec. 2022, the same poll showed DeSantis had 40 percent. Last month, he was at just 33 percent. Trump jumped seven points during that time.
"Republicans falling out of love with DeSantis could prove to be his downfall," the analysis explained. It goes back to those overwhelmingly dedicated MAGA fans that cannot be persuaded to abandon him. While the Trump favorability numbers are low overall, the "very favorable" is higher than most other Republican challengers.
Another way to measure the enthusiasm gap is by looking at how satisfied voters would be with one nominee over the other.
The May ABC News/Washington Post poll shows 68 percent of Republicans would be satisfied if DeSantis were the nominee. Only 22 percent would be dissatisfied. They're high numbers, but Trump's are 76 percent satisfaction with 21 percent dissatisfied.
As mentioned above, those numbers aren't going up for DeSantis the more he campaigns. They're going down. The analysis cited the Dec. 2022 Monmouth University poll showing DeSantis at 79 percent satisfaction and 10 percent dissatisfied.
The numbers show that the Trump supporters have already chosen their side. He has 80 percent satisfaction support among Republican college graduates, but his non-college grad satisfaction rate dropped by 20 percent. Former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) noticed the drop too, and said it could indicate DeSantis can be beaten.
His campaign slogan appears to be about what a "fighter" he is, but as his campaign kicked off, DeSantis said he wouldn't respond to everything Trump said to insult him. However, the analyst explained that by the end of the week, DeSantis had started fighting back. The problem, the analyst suggested, is that attacking the party's favorite guy might not be the best way to win them over.
When it came to mental soundness, 56% said that Trump should not be president. As for Biden, 60% of those Fox News polled agreed he did not have the mental soundness to do the job.
Fox News noted that the difference between the two candidates was within the survey's margin of error.
The national poll gathered information from 1,001 registered voters between May 19 and 22.
WASHINGTON — America’s in the midst of its first AI-fueled election. Duping voters in 2024 — a year where “deepfakes” are expected to supplant our current meme-driven political unreality — will be easier than ever.
Bogus but hyper-realistic videos of Donald Trump secretly plotting with Russian President Vladimir Putin or President Joe Biden in a secret White House confab with antifa activists? Entirely fake speeches delivered by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) or Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)?
All possible now. Just watch the wouldn’t-have-been-possible-in-2020 deepfake video starring a computer generated Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s depicted as desperately trying to convince his colleagues in “The Office” that he’s not wearing women’s clothes. Donald Trump Jr. is among the people who've shared it on social media in recent days.
Among the most unprepared for AI-infused election shenanigans: members of Congress themselves.
“I haven't heard it talked about here,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Raw Story when asked about deepfakes and AI impacting Election 2024.
It’s not that the the Capitol isn’t buzzing with AI regulatory chatter since OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before lawmakerslast Tuesday — including telling Hawley that even he is “nervous” about large language learning platforms, such as his company’s ChatGPT, being used to manipulate voters. The problem: this was news to many at the Capitol.
That’s why experts are nervous, too, especially since AI technology is evolving at warp speed.
“Congress should have been proactive yesterday — decades ago,” Woodrow Hartzog, professor of Law at Boston University, told Raw Story.
Congress has a ton of catching up to do, mainly because U.S. policymakers — at the behest of Silicon Valley’steams of Washington lobbyists — have dithered for years in writing rules for the digital road, more or less allowing tech companies to police themselves.
“At the very least, it needs to think about the fact that this is not just a technology and deepfakes problem, that the problem of deepfakes in our democracy is rooted in significantly broader structural concerns around tech accountability, generally, mixed with our laws surrounding privacy, surveillance, free expression, copyright law, equality and anti-discrimination,” Hartzog continued. “All of those seemingly disparate areas — and the cracks that have been growing in our protections around them — are part of this story.”
How dangerous, really?
Artificial intelligence offers great promise of taking humanity to new technological heights.
But the ability to create increasingly realistic fake media is getting easier by the nanosecond, too. What formerly required specialized expertise — not to mention days and weeks worth of time; thus dedication — only to concoct clunky deepfakes is now available to all. The democratization of fakes has many experts freaked out.
It’s easy to see how AI-based deceptions, propaganda and scams could damage an election’s status as truly free and fair, even if just a small fraction of voters are affected.
Consider that the 2016 election was decided by some 80,000 votes across three states. Countless bots and Russian intelligence officers involved themselves (if Senate Republicans are to be believed). Campaign operatives — domestic and foreign, and as bad as they can be — have nothing on AI’s powers (if its creators are to be believed). Especially when combined with today’s always-improving deepfake technology, the ability to dupe is almost easy.
“Think about this as nuclear technology,” Siwei Lyu, a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, told Raw Story. “Right now, instead of just the U.S. government and a few governments in the world knowing the techniques for making atomic bombs, like everybody now can have a toolkit off of Amazon to make their own atomic bombs. How dangerous that could be, right?”
Lyu continued: “Of course, somebody may use that as a generator to power up my house and then I don't need to be on the electricity grid anymore, but there are people for sure who will misuse it — and those are the things we have very little control over. So that's really where the problem is.”
The fear for Election 2024 isn’t, necessarily, one big, earth-altering digital atomic explosion; the fear is dozens, hundreds or even thousands of personal smart bombs — polished, powered and propelled by generative AI — being quietly dropped on susceptible-to-vulnerable populations in swing states.
They might originate from domestic sources: say, unscrupulous super PACs or lone-wolf political agitators unconcerned about the nation’s largely antiquated election laws and regulations that, in some cases, haven’t been updated since the dawn of the World Wide Web. If that.
Worse, they could come from foreign actors — think Russia, or perhaps Iran and North Korea — who’ve already demonstrated an insatiable appetite for sowing chaos in U.S. elections.
“The makers of deepfakes will create those fake media to reinforce, strengthen your belief, and then the recommendation algorithm will actually push that to you as a user so you will start to see more of this stuff,” Lyu said.
This will all be guided by the private data of millions of Americans, which Silicon Valley firms already have access to because of congressional inaction. When fed into generative AI platforms like ChatGPT the algorithmic loop of fear-drenched, truthy sounding falsehoods and fakes could prove infinite.
'Got to move fast'
Back on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is now a part of bipartisan negotiations – along with Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Todd Young (R-IN) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) – focused on legislating artificial intelligence.
“We can’t move so fast that we do flawed legislation, but there is no time for waste, or delay, or sitting back,” Schumer told his colleagues on the Senate floor after Altman testified. “We've got to move fast."
There’s only a short window to act, because generative AI is becoming more ubiquitous – more than 100 million people have already signed up for ChatGPT alone.
“And so while it is important for Congress to act, I hope that they realize that they can't just pass one anti-deepfake law of 2023 and dust their hands and call it a day, because this problem is one that is significantly larger than just a few algorithmic tools,” Hartzog, the BU law professor and co-author of Breached: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It, told Raw Story. “It's fundamental to our whole sort of media information distribution networks and free expression and consumer protection laws.”
Other lawmakers don’t feel the same pressure. Many assume America’s safer than other nations when it comes to AI-powered deepfakes.
“I think in a more advanced ecosystem, like our new system, it's probably easier for campaigns to jump on it pretty quickly and knock it down. I think in the developing world it could start riots and civil wars,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently told Raw Story.
Others in Congress – including party leaders – think the government is largely helpless when it comes to preventing the deepfake-ification of American elections.
“All we can do is tell the truth and appeal to the public not to believe everything they hear and see,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Senate majority whip, told Raw Story.
While 2020 was the "alternative fact” election, 2024 is primed to be the alternative reality election. “Fake news” isn’t just a bumper sticker anymore; it’s now reality.
“We’re in it,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) told Raw Story, “and AI is making it exponentially easier to create a false narrative, to project that false narrative worldwide, to make the false narrative believable by creating much more detailed and thorough content and it will be very hard to take something that’s disseminated worldwide and knock it down as false.”
Gillibrand has been calling for the creation of a new federal Data Protection Agency for years now, arguing the Federal Trade Commission is toothless when it comes to regulating big tech. The Federal Election Commission, meanwhile, often takes years to reach any agreement on even the most modest updates to its political advertising regulations.
“I think we have to keep focusing on the truth and making sure we have levers of government and a legal system to create accountability and oversight to make sure the truth is protected,” Gillibrand said.
Legislating "truth" in a post-truth political universe may prove impossible, but we really won’t know until the dust settles after Election 2024. That’s why many lawmakers, experts and privacy advocates are bracing for an election like no other in U.S. history.
“Every anti-democratic trick in the book will be played in 2024. No doubt,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) – a Trump impeachment manager and member of the select Jan. 6 committee – recently told Raw Story. “The guy dines with racists and anti-Semites, Trump seems determined to prove that he can do anything he wants, including shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, and his cult following will not budge. So this is where we are in the 21st century.”
Rick Wilson — Lincoln Project co-founder and vocal Trump critic — is sharing his prediction for the 2024 primary and, by his projection, it doesn't look good for the Republican Party.
According to Wilson, former President Donald Trump would have to be "dead or in jail" for another Republican candidate to have a viable chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
To make matters worse, Wilson even suggested that incarceration might not be enough to diminish Trump's influence among voters. According to Mediaite, Wilson made his remarks during a recent segment of the "The Dean Obeidallah Show."
Obeidallah asked Wilson for his take on the feud between Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
"Is there anything we can do to amplify a DeSantis-Trump divide if that race gets closer, even if it doesn’t?" he asked.
Comparing the political feud to a scene from the movie, "Jaws," Wilson said, "I want you to think about that scene in Jaws where Roy Schneider’s on the back of the boat throwing chum in the water. That would be me. I want DeSantis and Trump to fight and fight and fight. And fight and fight."
He added, "Now, I want that because I know. And a lot of my former conservative friends are like, well, you’re just, oh, why don’t you love DeSantis? DeSantis is a guy who is terrible at this work."
Wilson went on to explain why DeSantis and other Republican presidential candidates will likely be fighting an uphill battle.
"Trump still has a stranglehold over the Republican Party," Wilson noted. "I have to plan for the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that Donald Trump will be the nominee in the Republican Party once again. There is very there are very few paths to get a Ron DeSantis or any other of these jokers in the field over the finish line in the primary."
"I mean, Trump has to be dead or in jail," he added. "And even in those cases, he still might win the primaries."
Donald Trump on Saturday said his biggest opponent in the 2024 race for the Republican nomination for President, Ron DeSantis, fired his friend and top campaign official, just like on Trump's former show, "The Apprentice."
The former president, who earlier in the day attacked the conservative advocacy group called "Club for Growth" on social media for its support of DeSantis, posted on his Truth Social platform that DeSantis fired Phil Cox, a former executive director of the Republican Governors Association. He also had some words for Cox, who was reportedly chosen for the RGA post based on "close relationships with a number of Republican governors."
"Ron DeSanctimonious just fired, like on 'The Apprentice,' his friend and top campaign official, Phil Cox, because his campaign is a complete disaster, and 2028 is looking really bad," Trump wrote of DeSantis, utilizing a nickname he uses almost every time he speaks of DeSantis.
"His campaign manager, who so deftly handled the Ted Cruz campaign against me, wanted to work for me, but was turned down - a 'money grubber' like no other, and won’t quit until he’s got every last penny," he added. "Now 'Rob' must change the theme of his campaign from NEVER BACK DOWN to WINNING ISN’T EVERYTHING!"
Donald Trump late Saturday leveled an attack against the "Club for Growth," a conservative advocacy group that recently criticized the former president in an ad, for supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
Trump posted on Truth Social, his own social media platform that he created after being banned from most other platforms in the wake of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt, that the group is attempting to counter DeSantis' own policy decisions.
"The very stupid, China loving 'Club for No Growth,' which has been backing Ron De Sanctimonious as his poll numbers have been absolutely CRASHING, has just spent some of the RINO money they have accumulated on an ad campaign hoping to counter the fact that Desanctus, just off the worst Presidential 'Launch' in history, opted three times to cut & destroy Social Security, even lifting the minimum age to 70," Trump wrote. "He also voted to cut Medicare & institute a 23% National Sales Tax. Ron is a loser!"
