Florida governor Ron DeSantis taught former president Trump and his allies a tough lesson this week: Be careful what you wish for.
Trump’s team pressed DeSantis to speak out against the former president’s impending criminal indictment, and DeSantis responded — in explicit detail.
“Look, 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, I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said. “But what I can speak to is if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to do something about porn-star hush-money payments, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office and I think that that’s fundamentally wrong.”
Trump claimed over the weekend that he would be arrested Tuesday in connection with a $130,000 payment allegedly made to porn actress Stormy Daniels and urged his supporters to protest outside the courthouse in Manhattan.
While the NYPD erected steel barricades outside Manhattan’s Criminal Court Monday afternoon, signaling a big event could in fact be coming, Tuesday came and went without a Trump arrest — just as NR’s Andrew C. McCarthy predicted, though McCarthy does believe that the indictment is “imminent.”
Reports indicate that prosecutors plan to indict Trump for falsifying business records in relation to the hush-money payments, which is a misdemeanor offense. If they can prove that a second crime was concealed or committed, prosecutors will likely seek to upgrade the offense to a Class E felony.
DeSantis, meanwhile, responded to Trump’s looming indictment after allies of the former president said they were “taking receipts” on the governor’s silence and warned that “history will remember.”
The governor’s comments also included an attack on Alvin Bragg and other progressive DAs as “Soros-funded” and noted he’s the only governor in the country who has acted to remove a “Soros district attorney,” referring to his suspension of Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren last year. Warren was canned after he said he would not enforce a number of state laws, including a 15-week abortion ban and prohibitions on sex changes for minors.
Nonetheless, the response was not exactly what Trump world wanted.
“Governor DeSantis, you’re better than this,” Steve Bannon cried. “That was a weasel approach. Don’t throw in the thing about the porn star. I don’t need to hear it from you, okay?”
My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell shared a similar sentiment: “DeSantis is the Trojan Horse we thought he was. I just want to put that out there, how disgusting he is.” He further said, “Evil is greedy and this will backfire on him just like everything else does.”
Other potential 2024 contenders spoke out against the indictment but decided to focus on Bragg’s misdeeds rather than reminding voters of Trump’s.
Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, speaking to Fox News on Monday, said of the possible arrest: “Right now, it’s rumor. And I certainly hope it’s not the case.”
She added: “But from everything I’ve seen from this New York district attorney is that this would be something he’d be doing for political points. And I think what we know is when you get into political prosecutions like this, it’s more about revenge than it is about justice. And, you know, I think the country would be better off talking about things that the American public cares about than to sit there and have to deal with some revenge by some political people in New York.”
In response to DeSantis’s comments on the potential indictment and Trump’s reply, Haley said: “They can go back and forth on all of that stuff . . . The American people want us talking about things that really matter.”
Former vice president Mike Pence said the impending indictment smells of a “politically charged prosecution.”
“I’m taken aback at the idea of indicting a former president of the United States, at a time when there’s a crime wave in New York City,” Pence said on ABC’s This Week. “The fact that the Manhattan DA thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority, I think . . . just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country.”
Vivek Ramaswamy warned that a Trump indictment “would be a national disaster” and called it “un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals.”
“This will mark a dark moment in American history and will undermine public trust in our electoral system itself. I call on the Manhattan District Attorney to reconsider this action and to put aside partisan politics in service of preserving our Constitutional republic,” he said.
New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu warned that the indictment news could be “building a lot of sympathy for the former president.” He continued: “I just think that not just the media, but really, a lot of the Democrats have misplayed this in terms of building sympathy for the former president and it does drastically change the paradigm as we go into the 2024 election.”
Trump has in fact been fundraising off of the potential indictment. “If this political persecution goes unchallenged, one day it won’t be me they’re targeting . . . It’ll be you,” an email from Trump’s campaign warned on Sunday, echoing Trump’s 2024 kick-off speech in which he promised to act as his supporters’ “retribution.”
Other potential 2024 contenders, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.), remained silent.
For his part, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson warned his viewers that an indictment would be the result of the “abuse of law-enforcement power” and would mean that “voters will never again determine the outcome of a presidential election.”
Andy McCarthy said that once the first prosecutor has “crossed the Rubicon, others are sure to follow,” suggesting Trump is “highly likely to be indicted by the Fulton County prosecutor for alleged felonies arising out of his efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.”
Another indictment may be coming in connection with special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified intelligence at Mar-a-Lago.
A federal judge ruled Friday that Smith’s team had enough evidence to support the claim that Trump “intentionally concealed” the existence of classified documents in his possession from his attorneys, ABC News first reported. U.S. Judge Beryl Howell said that prosecutors had made a “prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations,” therefore dismissing the attorney-client privileges invoked by two of his lawyers. The judge ordered Trump attorney Evan Corcoran to testify before the grand jury investigating the documents case.
Trump’s campaign blasted the report: “Shame on Fake News ABC for broadcasting ILLEGALLY LEAKED false allegations from a Never Trump, now former chief judge, against the Trump legal team,” a spokesperson said.
While all eyes have remained on Trump’s legal woes this week, DeSantis pushed back into the spotlight with his comments on the impending indictment and other comments made during a sit-down interview with Piers Morgan.
“If I were to run, I’m running against Biden,” DeSantis told Morgan in an interview previewed in the New York Post. “Ultimately you know the guy I’m gonna focus on is Biden because I think he’s failed the country. I think the country wants a change. I think they want a fresh start and a new direction and so we’ll be very vocal about that.”
Asked about Trump’s “Ron DeSanctimonious” jabs, the governor replied: “I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels. We’ll go with that, that’s fine. I mean you can call me whatever you want, just as long as you also call me a winner because that’s what we’ve been able to do in Florida, is put a lot of points on the board and really take this state to the next level.”
But while DeSantis took on Biden and Trump, Haley took DeSantis to task over his comments on the war in Ukraine, questioning the views of “some on the right.”
“They say the U.S. shouldn’t care about Ukraine because this war isn’t our fight. Some call it a mere ‘territorial dispute.’ They say we should ignore Ukraine so we can focus on China. This has it backward. China loses if Ukraine wins,” Haley wrote, referring to DeSantis’s statement to Carlson earlier this month that Russia’s invasion is a “territorial dispute” that is not vital to U.S. interests.
She added: “There are many things we must do to counter China on technology, trade and intelligence. But it’s naive to think we can counter China by ignoring Russia. It’s a dangerous world, and backing away from support for Ukraine would embolden those looking to harm U.S. interests.”
Around NR
• The impending Trump prosecution “offers a taste of what our national politics will be like post-November 2024 if Donald Trump wins the presidency again,” Rich Lowry writes. “If Donald Trump’s Truth Social post about his impending arrest made it feel like our politics was about to reach another level of insanity, just wait.”
• It’s possible to underestimate Donald Trump — even in 2023 — Michael Brendan Dougherty warns:
Anyone — liberal or anti-Trump media outlets, conservative politicians, district attorneys, anyone — who works to advance Donald Trump’s primary candidacy because they think he’s a general-election sure loser is playing a very dangerous game. He is still the strongest candidate among Republican voters, he’s built a strong campaign operation, and if he can win the nomination, anything is possible.
• Charles C. W. Cooke argues that you can only have one: Trump or conservatism.
Conservative Americans must choose. Do they want Donald Trump to play a central role in Republican politics, or do they want to win elections and achieve the policy outcomes that supposedly inspired them to get involved in politics in the first instance?
• Jeffrey Blehar has a message for Trump after his calls for protests in the event of his arrest: “Just Shut It, Donny.”
Donald Trump wants a riot, is my guess. Or he is indifferent to the possibility of one. What he wants, most likely, is a media-frenzy mob scene on his behalf, and what happens in the wake of that? Well, that’s somebody else’s department. We have lived through this once already.