Former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social Monday to fire another round at GOP rival and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, asserting that fellow GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will overtake “Ron DeSanctimonious” in the polls.
“Ron DeSanctimonious is dropping in the Polls so fast that he soon may be falling behind young Vivek Ramaswamy,” Trump wrote on his social network platform.
Ohio businessman and anti-woke crusader Ramaswamy, who announced his run for the White House last month, trails near the bottom in polls of declared and presumptive Republican presidential candidates. Trump is outpacing his nearest competitor, DeSantis, by double digits, with Florida’s popular governor’s support falling, according to the latest Morning Consult poll tracker.
Ramaswamy’s star appears to be rising — at least with Trump — after he said an indictment against the former president would be a “national disaster.”
“Principles go beyond partisanship. Let the American people decide who governs. This will mark a dark moment in American history and will undermine public trust in our electoral system itself,” Ramaswamy tweeted last weekend after Trump predicted on Truth Social that he would be arrested on Tuesday.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is investigating allegations Trump paid hush money to silence an affair with a porn star before the 2016 election. Critics, including, Ramaswamy, say the Democrat-led probe is another politically driven attack on the former president, the left’s Public Enemy No. 1.
“I call on the Manhattan District Attorney to reconsider this action and to put aside partisan politics in service of preserving our Constitutional republic,” Ramaswamy wrote in his tweet.
A Trump indictment would be a national disaster. It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals. If a Republican prosecutor in 2004 had used a campaign finance technicality to arrest then-candidate John Kerry while Bush & Cheney were in…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 18, 2023
DeSantis took another tack.
“You’re talking about this situation, and like, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. I just can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said at an official press conference in Panama City.
Trump called DeSantis a “disciple of Super RINO Paul Ryan,” referring to former Speaker of the House and Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate.
“People are beginning to find out that Ron wanted to destroy Social Security, and raise its minimum age to at least 70. He also had strong plans for cutting Medicare, and still does,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
DeSantis, while a member of congress, voted for nonbinding budget resolutions that would have raised the federal retirement age to 70 in order for seniors to claim Social Security and Medicare. He recently told Fox News, “We’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans.”
As for Ramaswamy, he may be lagging in the polls but he appears to be beating fundraising expectations. In the month since launching his campaign, the candidate has taken in donations from more than 10,000 individual contributors, with nearly a third first-time political digital donors, Fox News reported.
“First-time donors to the party are off the charts for us,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m told that it’s supposed to be in the low single digits in terms of percentage of first-time donors to the GOP.”
“This is just organic…I think there’s something unique going on,” Ramaswamy said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “This sort of takes a sledgehammer to the roof of expectations of what we were supposed to do in the first month, which is great.”
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Ron DeSantis” by U.S. Secretary of Defense. CC BY 2.0. Photo “Vivek Ramaswamy” by Vivek Ramaswamy.
