Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Wednesday evening that he is running for President of the United States.
DeSantis filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission earlier in the afternoon and released his official launch video at 6 p.m. EST on the platform.
“Our border is a disaster. Crime infests our cities. The federal government makes it harder for families to make ends meet. And the president flounders,” DeSantis said in the video. “But decline is a choice. Success is attainable. And freedom is worth fighting for.”
“Righting the ship requires restoring sanity to our society, normalcy to our communities, and integrity to our institutions. Truth must be our foundation — and common sense can no longer be an uncommon virtue. In Florida, we proved that it can be done,” he continued. “We chose facts over fear, education over indoctrination, law and order over rioting and disorder. We held the line when freedom hung in the balance.”
“We showed that we can — and must — revitalize America. We need the courage to lead and the strength to win,” he concluded. “I’m Ron DeSantis, and I’m running for president to lead our Great American Comeback.”
WATCH:
I’m running for president to lead our Great American Comeback. pic.twitter.com/YmkWkLaVDg
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) May 24, 2023
DeSantis also joined a special event on Twitter with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, which received such intense interest that it crashed the event due to the servers being overloaded.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP
“The servers are straining somewhat,” Musk said at one point as 700,000+ people logged into the event.
BREAKING: Twitter experiencing severe slowness as large number of users attempt to join Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential announcement Space pic.twitter.com/PkjepGsX8e
— Intel Point Alert (@IntelPointAlert) May 24, 2023
DeSantis’ campaign is expected to be largely centered around the enormous achievements that he has secured as governor for the state of Florida, dubbed the “Florida Blueprint,” and on how he can transfer those successes to the national level as President of the United States.
The governor’s rise to the top of the Republican Party was cemented by his handling of the COVID pandemic, which included bucking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public health official whom the previous administration repeatedly took advice from throughout the course of the pandemic, and resisting draconian measures that impeded the freedoms of people in his state. As a result, the state led the country in net-in migration over the last couple of years.
Due to the governor’s overwhelming popularity in the state — which was made clear last year with his 19-point blowout victory during his re-election — the state’s legislature largely does what he says in implementing his agenda.
Some of the key legislative victories that he has secured this year alone include:
- Protecting Florida’s children from permanent mutilating surgical procedures, gender identity politics in schools; protecting them from attending sexually explicit adult performances; and protecting them from woke pronoun usage in schools.
- Prohibiting institutions from spending federal or state dollars on discriminatory initiatives, such as so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” programs, and banning political loyalty tests.
- Combatting human trafficking by strengthens criminal penalties against traffickers and creating civil actions that victims can take to recover damages and attorney’s fees from adult entertainment establishments.
- Sending more than 1,100 assists to the help secure the U.S. southern border from the illegal immigration crisis caused by President Joe Biden’s policies.
- Banning federally adopted central bank digital currency (CBDC) by excluding it from the definition of money within Florida’s Uniform Commercial Code and banning foreign-issued CBDC to protect consumers against globalist efforts to adopt a worldwide digital currency.
- Protecting Floridians from medical mandates and prohibiting dangerous gain-of-function research.
- Signing the strongest anti-illegal immigration legislation in the country into law.
- Cracking down on Chinese Communist Party influence in the state by banning their ability to purchase agriculture land and land near military bases and critical infrastructure, protecting digital data from Chinese spies, and stopping their influence in the education system.
- Protecting Floridians from the corporatist environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) movement — a worldwide effort to inject woke political ideology across the financial sector, placing politics above the fiduciary duty to make the best financial decisions for beneficiaries.
- Signing into law his third consecutive anti-crime, pro-public safety legislative package that strengthens pre-trial detention and pushes back against “bail reform” efforts, increases sentences for drug traffickers that target children, and subjects child rapists to the death penalty.
- Strengthening Floridians’ Second Amendment rights by allowing Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a government-issued permit.
- Expanding available school choice options for all students in Florida by eliminating financial eligibility restrictions and the current enrollment cap.
- Ending Disney’s self-governing status and special privileges — which no other company in the state had — and forcing them to play by the same rules as everyone else.
- Protecting unborn babies by signing a heartbeat bill into law that bans abortion the moment that a heartbeat can be detected.
Of the 113 Republicans in the Florida legislature, 99 of them endorsed DeSantis for president last week while only one — state sen. Joe Gruters — endorsed the former president.
But even Gruters could not deny the overwhelming impact that DeSantis has had on advancing the conservative agenda in the state.
“We’ve had conservative leadership in Florida for the past 23 years, but we’ve passed more conservative bills in the past two years than the previous 20, and more this year than the past 22,” Gruters said. “It’s a rocket ship, a steam engine.”
James Uthmeier, a former official in the Trump administration who now serves as DeSantis’ chief-of-staff, said he’s never seen someone get as hands-on as DeSantis when it comes to crafting legislation and getting it passed.
“He sits and talks through the nitty-gritty of policy and the budget,” Uthmeier said. “He’s ingrained in the process in a way I haven’t seen working in the Trump Administration or with other public officials.”
This is a breaking news story; refresh the page for updates.
