Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential run is cursed by endorsements from Republican 'Never-Trumpers' says an attorney.
The outspoken conservative announced his entry into the Republican primary race last week in a glitch-plagued Twitter webcast that was widely mocked.
He faces an uphill battle to overcome former president Donald Trump's hugely overwhelming poll lead among registered Republican voters for a shot at challenging Democrat President Joe Biden in 2024.
Tyler Nixon told Sputnik that one of DeSantis' weak points was his personality — or lack of it.
"It's like a tree stump, unfortunately, he's not a very warm individual up close, despite what he might appear to be on the stump or giving speeches," the writer said.
"He's been very, very disciplined about coming out swinging with a very tight message," Nixon said, but noted that "he's sort of very awkward in person" as reflected in a recent video of the Florida governor greeting voters in Iowa. "It just was very, very stiff, and I think also he feels very scripted as as he gets higher into the big time."
The DeSantis campaign's big pitch to voters seems to be that "everybody's had enough of Trump. Let's just move on from Trump," he noted.
"This is reflected by the the sort of the national security hawk types who are backing him," Nixon said. "I mean, you have [former Florida governor] Jeb Bush backing him, as I understand it, Paul Ryan" — the former Republican House of Representatives speaker who Trump famously said he "wouldn't want to be in a foxhole" with after Ryan failed to back his 2016 presidential campaign.
The problem for DeSantis and his backers is that "Trump sort of wakened up the sleeping giant of the Ron Paul sort of Republican Party," the pundit argued, meaning socially-conservative but also against foreign interventions and wars.
"Trump, I think, decisively went to that and certainly spurned and bucked the the Republican establishment," Nixon added. "He basically took out Jeb Bush, who was the heir apparent when Hillary was to be the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination in 2016, and I think smashed the power of that."
The renewed anyone-but-Trump campaign by the likes of the Lincoln Project is a response to "the many Lawfare actions being waged against Trump, whether civil or or potentially criminal, obviously, with this special counsel brewing," the attorney stressed.
The Florida governor has tried to brand himself as a conservative rebel by confronting liberal educators and the Disney corporation over promoting transgender ideology to children. But his list of big-name supporters betray his pro-establishment base.
"DeSantis is trying to put on the MAGA front, so to speak, but he's he's trying to bring back the old establishment of the Romney type," Nixon pointed out. "I mean, he was endorsed by Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney."
The presidential hopeful is damning his campaign by "adopting what everyone doesn't want" including by supporting Biden's gifts of tens of billions worth of the military's arms supplies to the Ukrainain regime of Volodymr Zelensky.
"These overseas interventions, the militarism, whatever you want to call the Neocon, the hawk," Nixon said, "Even the Ukraine deal, that's just not popular... this is not a sort of groundswell type of policy generally."
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