Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ struggling presidential campaign seems to have settled on a strategy to overtake Nikki Haley in the GOP primary: upping the cruelty factor.
Recent polls have shown DeSantis trailing the former South Carolina governor and Donald Trump in key primary states. And to draw a distinction between himself and the other GOP presidential hopefuls, DeSantis showed during the last GOP debate that he may take a harder line on hot-button issues.
For example, Haley staked out her own cruel position in response to a question about undocumented migrants who are already living in the U.S., saying she’d send millions of them back where they came from. Not to be outdone, DeSantis got positively homicidal in his response to a question about drug smugglers at the southern border, saying he’d shoot them “stone cold dead” — a phrase his supporters have tried to market as a slogan in recent months.
During an interview with a right-wing radio host on Tuesday, DeSantis again sought to separate himself from Haley. This time he suggested that Haley wasn’t extreme enough in the wake of the protests against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
He said:
[Haley] has never fought any big fight on our behalf as conservatives — and won any big fight. Anytime the guns come out — anytime the left does, she cuts and runs. I remember when the George Floyd riots were happening, I called out the National Guard. I said, ‘I’m standing with police.’ She was tweeting that it needed to be personal and painful for every single person. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why does that need to be personal and painful for you or me? We had nothing to do with it.’ It just shows an example of her adopting this left-wing mindset and accepting the narrative.
Best as I can tell, the “narrative” DeSantis is referring to is the one that says people should care about the lives of other people, even if they may be suspected of a crime. It’s an odd…
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