Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) took a not particularly subtle shot at the former president donald trump on the Monday before Trump’s likely impeachment, saying he personally wouldn’t know how to pay “hush money” to a “porn star.”
At the same time, DeSantis suggested that Trump’s impeachment is politically motivated, noting that liberal financier George Soros, who is regularly invoked in right-wing anti-Semitic conspiracies, had endorsed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
“I don’t know what it takes to pay hush money to a porn star to ensure silence about some kind of alleged affair,” DeSantis said at an event in Florida on Monday morning. “I can not talk about that”.
“But what I can talk about is if you have a prosecutor who is ignorant of crimes that occur every day in their jurisdiction, and chooses to go back many, many years ago, to try to use something about secret porn star payments, that is an example of pursuing a political agenda and building the office,” DeSantis continued. “And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”
DeSantis is widely expected to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, which would put him in competition with Trump, who has already declared his candidacy. The Florida governor has faced pressure from Trump allies to criticize the looming impeachment. Clearly, he is trying to split the difference by attacking the prosecutor and reminding social conservatives of Trump’s behavior.
If an indictment is filed as expected this week, it would mark the first instance in US history of a former president facing criminal charges. bragg appears likely to charge Trump with crimes related to a $130,000 payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in the final days of his 2016 run for president.
However, the Manhattan case is the least serious of the potential criminal cases against Trump. A special federal prosecutor, Jack Smith, is investigating both Trump’s handling of classified documents and his role in the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill. And a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, could soon bring charges related to Trump’s efforts to change election results there.
DeSantis also indicated that he would play no role in any fight over whether Trump, who spends much of his time at the Mar-a-Lago social club in Palm Beach, will face extradition to New York.
“I have no interest in getting involved in some kind of circus fabricated by some Soros district attorney,” he said. “I have real issues that I have to deal with.”
That response, in particular, has drawn renewed fire from Trump allies eager to paint DeSantis as a fake populist more in tune with maligned figures in the Republican establishment than the former president. Trump’s eldest son don jrwas one of those critics.
DeSantis devoted much of his response, which came after a weekend of silence on the matter, attacking Bragg and Soros, the latter of whom has supported criminal justice reformers running for office. district attorney across the country.
“The real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans in all these different jurisdictions because of the reckless political agenda that these Soros prosecutors bring to the job,” DeSantis said.
Crime spiked in the US during and after the height of the coronavirus pandemic, before falling last year. But there is little evidence that cities with liberal prosecutors have seen larger increases in crime than those with traditional law-and-order district attorneys.
In 2022, for example, New York City’s murder rate was one-third that of Jacksonville, a city in DeSantis’ home state with a Republican district attorney.
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