Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a blunt answer for businessman and Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy’s call for his fellow candidates to remove themselves from ballots in Colorado and Maine in solidarity with former President Donald Trump.
“Just absurd,” DeSantis told Laura Ingraham in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
“I mean, I have a responsibility to accumulate delegates,” DeSantis continued. “I’m not gonna unilaterally cede any, I’m gonna win as many as I can, and I’ve been very clear about both of those decisions and those states.”
The Florida Republican told Ingraham that he expects those decisions to be reversed anyway, rendering Ramaswamy’s posturing ultimately meaningless.
“It’s not consistent with the Constitution,” he said. “I do expect them to get reversed. I’ve raised the question about Biden. I mean, if he has green-lit eight million illegals invading this country, is he eligible to be on? So we can play this game all along. I think it’s not going to end up well for our country.”
He also suggested that if he or one of the other Republican hopefuls had been the ones removed from the ballot, Trump wouldn’t be removing his own name from it or calling on any other candidates to do so.
“But I do know this, that if any of the other ones of us had gotten kicked off the ballot, Trump would be spiking the football, let’s just be clear,” DeSantis said. “That is just the fact of the matter.”
“That’s probably accurate,” replied Ingraham, who served as an informal adviser to Trump during his presidency. “I think that’s a fair point.”
The Florida governor is correct in his assertion that the decisions in both Colorado and Maine — not to mention any other states in which leftists attempt to remove Trump’s name from the primary ballot — are very likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court, as numerous legal experts have said.
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Among other problems, Trump has not been found guilty of a single crime, at least not yet, which means that any attempt to exclude him from the election using the 14th Amendment has a serious problem with lack of due process.
Then there’s the question of whether the 14th Amendment even applies to former presidents — some lower court judges have already ruled that it does not.
More importantly, however, Trump’s name hasn’t been removed from the ballot in either state. It will remain on both pending appeals.
For Ramaswamy to demand that his opponents remove their names prior to those appeals being worked through is literally nothing more than empty grandstanding — it’s a political stunt from a man who regularly claims not to be a politician.
It’s not, however, a very surprising political stunt, given Ramaswamy’s standing in national polls.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of national polling, Ramaswamy peaked at about 8.1 percent of Republican primary voters on Sept. 21. He has since lost roughly half that support.
DeSantis, too, has fallen in the polls during the same time frame, though not nearly so dramatically — he’s dropped from about 12.7 percent on Sept. 21 to 10.9 percent most recently.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has risen, although probably irrelevantly, from 2.2 to 3.3 percent in the same period.
Only former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has fared better, having more than doubled her support from 4.9 percent on Sept. 21 to 11.2 percent now, according to RealClearPolitics.
Trump’s support has also increased somewhat since Sept. 21, to 62.5 percent, but as he was already sitting at 57.9 percent in September.
The GOP presidential nomination was Trump’s to lose in September, and it’s even more so now — regardless of whether Ramaswamy or any of the other Republican hopefuls take their names of the ballot or not.
