Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis says he chose to emphasize his record as Florida’s governor rather than quarrel with the other candidates at this week’s debate.
“The thing about the debate you know is nobody hit me, so I wasn’t going to get involved in that scrum. I know those guys were going back and forth,” DeSantis said Thursday night in northeast Iowa. “What I did with 100% of my time was to speak directly to the American people about our vision to reverse the country’s decline.”
DeSantis and his family stopped at the Field of Dreams last night and DeSantis spoke to a crowd in Rock Rapids this morning.
“I was proud to be able to, at that debate, muscle in issues that maybe the moderators didn’t necessarily want to talk about and one of those issues was the issue of our southern border. I am going to be the president who finally puts this issue to bed. We are going to solve the problem,” DeSantis said, as the audience applauded. “No more slogans. No more empty rhetoric. No more empty promises. We’re going to get it done.”
DeSantis has promised to classify Mexican drug cartels that are shipping fentanyl into the U.S. as foreign terrorist organizations. “We’re going to shoot them stone cold dead. They are going to be done and we are not going to put up with this anymore,” DeSantis said, getting applause from the audience and a loud whoop from one person in the crowd.
Former Iowa GOP co-chair Cody Hoefert also spoke to the crowd in Rock Rapids and said after watching Wednesday’s debate, he decided to endorse DeSantis.