Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave his two cents Wednesday, days after Vice President Kamala Harris kicked off her presidential campaign.
“Clearly we wanted to run against Biden,” the governor said at the end of a press conference in St. Petersburg after being asked his thoughts by a reporter. “You know, I’ve been dealing with Biden ever since I’ve been governor. The reality is he shouldn’t have run in 2020. He was in the basement. He used COVID to be able to do that, and then it’s really people have seen the decline over these years. It’s just the reality. And when he agreed to do that debate I told people, I was like, “You know, get your popcorn out. This is not going to go well.’”
DeSantis called President Joe Biden’s presidential debate against former President Donald Trump the “most consequential presidential debate in history,” and said he knew that night that Biden’s campaign would soon come to an end.
“I said, ‘His campaign ended tonight,’” the governor said. “It will either officially end at the convention when they pick a new nominee or it will officially end when he loses in November, because there was no way he was going to be able to win.”
DeSantis called the Trump-J.D. Vance ticket incredibly strong.
“I think that they can beat whoever comes,” he said.
The governor said if he had to chose someone to go up against besides Biden, he would likely pick Harris, calling her time in office “disastrous,” citing the crisis at the border among other issues.
“If you go back and watch her statements for when she was running for president in the 2020 cycle -- I mean, she basically said have an open border,” DeSantis said. “She wants taxpayer-funded healthcare and benefits for illegal aliens.”
DeSantis said Harris was “even more liberal” than Biden on immigration and also attacked her on other issues, from private health insurance to “raising funds to bail out rioters during the BLM riots in 2020.”
The governor said he didn’t believe is would make a difference who Harris selects as her running mate, and said he also thought is was possible that Democrats “go a different direction at the convention.”
“These delegates can vote who they want to,” he said, later adding, “I think it’s going to be a very interesting three or four weeks in the political scene.”