Ron DeSantis says Republicans will lose if Donald Trump becomes presidential nominee – US politics live
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Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis warned that if Donald Trump becomes the Republican presidential nominee, then Republicans are “going to lose”.
DeSantis cited Trump’s mounting legal issues as distraction to the election, saying: “If Donald Trump is the nominee, the election will revolve around all these legal issues, his trials, perhaps convictions if he goes to trials and loses there and about things like January 6.”
Speaking at a CNN town hall on Tuesday, he added: “We’re going to lose if voters are making a decision based on that. We don’t want it to be a referendum on those issues. We want it to be a referendum on the country going in the wrong direction and a candidate like me being a president that can reverse the decline.”
DeSantis’s comments follow his second-place finish at the Iowa caucuses earlier this week, where he landed 30 percentage points behind Trump and two points ahead of Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and the US ambassador to the UN under Trump.
Here are other developments in US politics:
The House is set to convene at 10am on border security legislation with first votes expected at 1.30pm ET, Politico Playbook reports.
ABC News has cancelled the next Republican presidential debate after Haley said she would not participate without Trump.
An aide to defense secretary Lloyd Austin who called 911 for an ambulance asked the ambulance to “not show up with lights and sirens”, a newly unveiled recording has revealed.
The US has “never been a racist country,” Nikki Haley said in a recent Fox News interview.
Speaking to Fox host Brian Kilmeade who asked the Republican presidential candidate whether the Republican party is racist, Haley responded, “No. We’re not a racist country. We’ve never been a racist country.”
She went on to add, “Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can.”
Haley also said, “I know, I faced racism when I was growing up. But I can tell you, today is a lot better than it was then.”
A few weeks ago at a campaign event, Haley declined to say that slavery was the cause of the US civil war, instead saying that the war involved “basically how the government was going to run” and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do”.
Haley later walked back on her remarks, saying, “Of course” the US civil war was about slavery.
During his town hall on Tuesday with CNN, Ron DeSantis also questioned his opponent Nikki Haley’s ability to bring Republicans together.
“I think it’s great in a general election to build a big tent…but to win a Republican primary…you gotta be able to win core Republicans, you gotta be able to win conservatives, and she can’t do that.”
He went on to add:
“She does not have the ability to win the kind of coalition that you need to win a Republican primary – period, much less take on Donald Trump.”
Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis warned that if Donald Trump becomes the Republican presidential nominee, then Republicans are “going to lose”.
DeSantis cited Trump’s mounting legal issues as distraction to the election, saying: “If Donald Trump is the nominee, the election will revolve around all these legal issues, his trials, perhaps convictions if he goes to trials and loses there and about things like January 6.”
Speaking at a CNN town hall on Tuesday, he added: “We’re going to lose if voters are making a decision based on that. We don’t want it to be a referendum on those issues. We want it to be a referendum on the country going in the wrong direction and a candidate like me being a president that can reverse the decline.”
DeSantis’s comments follow his second-place finish at the Iowa caucuses earlier this week, where he landed 30 percentage points behind Trump and two points ahead of Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and the US ambassador to the UN under Trump.
Here are other developments in US politics:
The House is set to convene at 10am on border security legislation with first votes expected at 1.30pm ET, Politico Playbook reports.
ABC News has cancelled the next Republican presidential debate after Haley said she would not participate without Trump.
An aide to defense secretary Lloyd Austin who called 911 for an ambulance asked the ambulance to “not show up with lights and sirens”, a newly unveiled recording has revealed.