In an announcement that’s been long awaited, the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has declared that he will run for election for the position of President of the United States.
The decision by Mr DeSantis to enter the Presidential race is going to make the next US Presidential election very interesting indeed. He’s a politician who has garnered a track record for getting things done and not being afraid to stand up to Washington. We saw this willingness to stand up to Washington during the Covid pandemic where he defied the demands of the Federal government for harsher lockdown policies with the result that Florida has come out of the pandemic much better off financially and socially than those states that followed government requirements slavishly.
He’s been very good at tackling the culture war issues of our time and has not been afraid to go after woke companies like Disney and has defied teachers unions by banning sexually explicit and politically biased books from school libraries and from classroom teaching.
From my vantage point, Mr DeSantis appears to me to have all the strengths of Donald Trump, such as understanding that a lot of Americans are pissed off by the way that they are governed, but without the faults of arrogance and lack of political nous. Out of all the Republican potential presidential candidates he has, apart from Trump, good name recognition and a high profile. For me he’s Donald Trump with the edges knocked off and that in my opinion is a good thing.
The next US Presidential election was always going to be interesting bearing in mind the current occupant of the White House and his poor record, but Mr DeSantis’s entry into the race makes this election for me even more interesting.
True it’s tricky to imagine anybody worse than Trump. Hopefully he won’t feel the need to declare five lies or lazy untruths a day, grope, sexually assault rape & generally fornicate.
He’s not big on women’s reproductive rights, preferring a woman to go full term with an “innocent” (sic) foetus, not withstanding it will die a painful death at or shortly after delivery, and he has loosened gun control, thereby pandering to the most rabid of his supporters.
But at the end of the day the USA gets the president is deserves. God bless America ( because they need him)
I don’t have to imagine someone worse than Trump, I can see him already resident in the White House.
I have a different view than you on Mr Trump. I thought he was a breath of fresh air and because he was from outside the political world was a very potent lightning rod for ordinary American’s concerns about the way they were being governed. I’m also grateful that the Middle East is slightly safer than it once was due to the Trump administration’s support for the Abraham Accords.
Mr Trump is however a man with a lot of personal faults such as his tendency to be bombastic and gobby when it is not needed. He also failed to comprehend that a president coming into government in the manner that he did would face pushback from the deep state and the establishment. A more astute person would have known that would have happened and acted accordingly to counter tht pushback.
Re abortion. This is much more of a live issue in the USA than it is in Europe. Mr Trump made the right decision to appoint constitutional originalists to the Supreme Court as this was the point when the journey started to return this matter to the individual states for decision, which I believe is the correct decision. Each state in the USA is different, has different demographics and different cultures therefore it’s right that decisions regarding abortion should be in the hands of these individual states. The US abortion rules are considerably more lax than those in Europe where limits of 12 to 24 weeks are imposed but in some states the time limit is much much later and there are Democrats who want to legalise abortion up until nine months.
As regards guns, America doesn’t have a gun problem, it has a mental health problem. In the past gun laws were considerably more lax than they are today yet we didn’t have the mass shooting tragedies that we have today, these started to occur in large numbers as society and family structures broke down. Chicago has very strict gun laws but has a horrendous number of shootings. Personally if I lived in the USA, especially if we lived in a rural area, I’d be very happy for my wife to carry a firearm as it’s a force multiplier for women it enables a woman to be equal to a man with ill intent.
I agree that America needs a decent president and they are not getting that via the current incumbent. Maybe Mr DeSantis could be that president that the Americans need.