CNN
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now officially running for president, is no longer tiptoeing around former President Donald Trump, nor is he shy about his plans to loosen the powers of the presidency like never before if he wins the White House
DeSantis, whose campaign raised $8.2 million in the first 24 hours, according to a campaign spokesman, has filled the hours since his failed launch on Twitter by taking his message to the familiar comforts of the conservative airwaves , where, in a dozen interviews, he attacked Trump as fiscally irresponsible and a supporter of amnesty for undocumented immigrants. He said Trump’s Covid-19 mitigation policies “destroyed millions of people’s lives” and told Fox News his priority “from day one” would be to fire the FBI director’s pick Past President, Christopher Wray.
Trump “is a different man today than when he ran in 2015 and 2016,” DeSantis told conservative Tennessee radio host Matt Murphy, adding, “I don’t know what happened to Donald Trump.”
The stepped-up attacks on Trump, whose endorsement DeSantis sought and campaigned for in his 2018 gubernatorial race, come after months of subtle digs at the former president’s tenure in the White House. Throughout Trump’s four years in office, of which DeSantis served nearly two years in Congress and two years as a closely aligned governor, and in the years since, the Florida Republican has never before been such a direct and public critic of the man who now waits. impersonate as GOP leader.
Now, DeSantis argues that he is better suited to deliver on promises that Trump himself failed to keep.
Doing so will require pushing the limits of executive power like never before, DeSantis has suggested in multiple interviews in the past 24 hours. He told conservative radio host Mark Levin that he had studied the “leverage points” of the US Constitution and would use his knowledge to exercise the “true scope” of presidential power.
“You have to know how to use your leverage to advance what you’re trying to achieve,” DeSantis told Twitter CEO Elon Musk during their conversation.
Trump has pushed back against those missives, mocking the mistakes that marred the Florida Republican’s entry into the race and suggesting DeSantis isn’t ready for the Oval Office.
“‘Rob’ DeSanctimonious and his poll numbers are dropping like a stone. I’d almost be inclined to say they’re record lows,” Trump posted Thursday on Truth Social. “The question is Rob just young and inexperienced and naive or more worryingly, is he a fool who has no idea what the hell he’s doing? We already have one in charge, we don’t need another one. We need MAGA.”
DeSantis’ vision for executive power appears to be at odds with the Republican Party’s traditional adherence to the principles of limited government. Many Republicans often accused former President Barack Obama of expanding his powers unconstitutionally, and DeSantis himself wrote an entire book in 2011 based on that perception. But it’s an approach Republican voters have come to expect from their elected leaders in the years since Trump emerged and dispensed with governing rules.
It also fits with how DeSantis has led since Tallahassee. As governor, DeSantis has systematically strengthened the governor’s office and expanded its constitutional powers in a way that no previous executive has. He took control of the state’s environmental protection agency, deployed the state’s police force in new ways, created a law enforcement team to monitor voting, removed an elected local prosecutor democratically and orchestrated the takeover of a small liberal arts college.
DeSantis has treated state bureaucracies that once operated independently as extensions of his executive offices. He has stocked state regulatory boards with like-minded political appointees, who have followed his lead in banning gender-affirming child care and expanding restrictions in school classes on sexual orientation and gender identity. He has chastised Disney, the state’s tourism engine and its most iconic business, for challenging him over those restrictions and has forced state lawmakers to approve a new congressional map drawn by his office.
“I may have won 51 percent of the vote, but that gave me the right to exercise 100 percent of the executive power, and I decided to use it to advance conservative principles,” DeSantis said at an event in Wisconsin on May 6
In his latest book, “The Courage to Be Free,” DeSantis described his extraordinary use of state power as deliberate and tactical. He wrote that before taking office he had studied an “exhaustive list” of the governor’s constitutional authority and would use “every lever available to us to advance our priorities.”
“What I was able to bring to the governor’s office was an understanding of how a constitutional form of government works, the different pressure points that exist, and how best to leverage authority to achieve substantive political victories,” he said. write.
Now, DeSantis’ opening message to Republican voters is that he would bring that methodical precision to the White House in a way that previous executives, including Trump, have not.
“Presidents have been unwilling to exercise Article Two power to discipline the bureaucracy,” DeSantis said. “I’ll come in and we’ll be spitting nails on the first day.”
Among his top priorities, DeSantis said, would be to “reconstitutionalize” the federal government, which he described as a plan to “discipline the bureaucracy” and agencies that he said are “absolved of constitutional responsibility.”
It would do away with the long tradition of government institutions like the US Department of Justice operating independently of the president, adopting a philosophy that Trump often governed but never so succinctly articulated.
“Republican presidents have bought into the canard that the DOJ and the FBI are subpoenaed, independent,” DeSantis said. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive power. They answer to the president-elect of the United States.”
DeSantis also weighed in on pardons, when asked if he would consider the cases of those facing charges related to the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol uprising, as well as whether he would pardon Trump if be charged federally.
It said it would look into all cases of “disadvantaged treatment based on politics or weaponisation”.
“The DOJ and the FBI have been weaponized. On day one, I’m going to have people come together and look at all these cases, that people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we’re going to be aggressive and issue pardons,” he DeSantis said on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show.” ” Thursday.
At the same time, DeSantis said the pardons would be dealt with individually, not necessarily to an entire group.
“We will apply relief as appropriate,” DeSantis said. “It will be done case by case.”
Those remarks drew an immediate rebuke from the Democratic Party, warning in a press release that DeSantis was “spending his first day as an official presidential candidate promising to consider pardons for January 6 rioters and convicted criminals who attacked law enforcement.”
In his private presentation to donors, Desantis noted that Trump, who has already served one term, would be a lame-duck president if elected. Since filing his candidacy on Wednesday, DeSantis has more publicly laid out why that should give Republicans pause.
“I understand, and all of your listeners should understand,” DeSantis said on Levin’s show, “that if we do everything right, if we’re disciplined, if we’re as strong as anybody could be, there’s still a two- deadlines. .”
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
