Not long after capturing the 2024 spotlight, Ron DeSantis pleaded with his supporters to “chill out.”
The newly reelected Florida governor has been basking in support from key players in the Republican nomination battle following his nearly 20-point victory over former Gov. Charlie Crist. The election tipped off a cascade of big-name defections from former President Donald Trump, from the New York Post calling DeSantis “DeFUTURE” to, most recently, GOP supporter and Twitter CEO Elon Musk dumping Trump for the Florida governor.
And a raft of polling has come out showing DeSantis eating away at Trump’s support in critical early voting states like Iowa and even beating Trump in hypothetical matchups if the primaries were held today.
But the GOP primaries are still more than a year away, which is why DeSantis and his team are playing it cool until next spring, when he plans to announce whether he will run for president, Republicans in touch with his team told Yahoo News. “He’s playing this right by ignoring Trump,” said one.
So far it seems to have worked. Trump teed up his formal campaign launch with routine attacks on DeSantis, even threatening to reveal potentially damaging information about the governor and mentioning his wife, DeSantis’s closest adviser and confidant.
But Trump dropped the attack right after his formal campaign launch on Nov. 15, leading one veteran adviser to suggest that the pageantry — which Trump is famously good at — has served its purpose for now. And that DeSantis has played it right by dodging Trump’s repeated hits.
“He’s playing a couple of dimensions of chess right now,” the Trump adviser said of DeSantis. The adviser added that it’s not just Trump who other Republican hopefuls are watching before making a decision whether to jump in, but DeSantis as well.
A Trump campaign spokesman didn’t return requests for comment for this article.
Since launching his campaign, Trump has received a bevy of attention on everything from the Justice Department’s announcement of a new special counsel to oversee the probes into his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and his taking of highly sensitive classified documents from the White House, to his recent dinner with the one of the nation’s most prominent white supremacists, Nick Fuentes, an event that was roundly condemned by Republicans (DeSantis hasn’t commented on the incident).
But Trump isn’t dominating the airwaves — and depriving his opponents of oxygen — nearly the way he did when he stormed the Republican Party in 2016.
The same week as Trump’s launch, former Vice President Mike Pence, a typically reserved politician, scored dozens of interviews and saw his memoir, released the same day as his former boss’s campaign launch, land at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.
All of which has power players in the GOP who could make or break a campaign “watching and waiting.”
“No one is going to push all their chips in on one candidate this far out,” said Dan Eberhart, a longtime GOP donor and CEO of the oil field services company Canary. “The early polls don’t mean anything, and there’s a long bumpy road to go before we know who is a contender and who’s a chump.”
That lackluster start to the 2024 race is giving DeSantis the breathing room to work through the beginning of his second term in office and keep courting donors behind the scenes.
DeSantis is set to oversee a special session of the Florida Legislature in the coming weeks to work on Florida’s homeowner’s insurance rules in the wake of Hurricane Ian. Around the same time, he is expected to host a retreat for possible campaign donors, according to three Republicans in touch with his tight-knit political operation.
DeSantis’s spokespeople did not return requests for comment for this story.
Trump’s advisers have pushed DeSantis to wait four years and run in 2028, on the assumption that Trump would either not run a fourth time or would leave office at the end of a second term, as mandated in the U.S. Constitution.
“Why not go be the best two-term governor of the third-largest state in modern history and then walk into the presidency in 2028?” longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said at the Christian Science Monitor’s Monitor Breakfast shortly before the midterm elections.
But for now, DeSantis isn’t feeling the pressure to announce his decision anytime soon.
Moscow has repeatedly complained that Western military support for Ukraine is dragging out the conflict, now in its 10th month, while risking a possible direct confrontation between Russia and the West. Kyiv and the West say Russia is to blame for any further escalation following what they say was Moscow's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, ongoing occupation of Ukrainian territory, and thinly veiled nuclear threats.
On Monday, a federal appeals court reinstated an Indiana law, originally signed in 2016, that requires abortion clinics to pay to have aborted fetal remains buried or cremated. This ruling from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns an Indiana judge’s decision in September that blocked the law for violating abortion patients’ right to religious freedom.
Throughout the duration of his senate campaign, Herschel Walker has claimed that he has deep ties to the state he’s hoping to represent in Washington — Georgia.
If you were in a food coma over the weekend you might have missed the fact that Herschel Walker, the abortion-opposing, abortion-funding, Texas-dwelling Republican nominee for U.S. Senate representing Georgia, actually challenged MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid to a debate, and that Reid accepted.
A federal appeals court has upheld the extortion and fraud convictions of a once-celebrated young Massachusetts mayor who was found guilty of extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from marijuana businesses. In a ruling published on Monday, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a series of challenges to former Fall River Mayor Jasiel Corriea's 2021 trial, concluding that the 30-year-old was “fairly tried and lawfully convicted by an impartial jury.” Correia, once a rising Democratic star after being elected at just 23 years old, was found guilty by jurors in Boston federal court of defrauding investors in his smartphone app and soliciting bribes from marijuana vendors who wanted to operate in the struggling mill city.
“Chadwick Boseman is Black Panther. You can’t refute that. And he’s a movie star," Jackson said
Iran calls for U.S. expulsion from the World Cup claiming it 'disrespected' flag
Balenciaga has filed a $25 million lawsuit against the producers of its campaign ad that featured a Supreme Court decision on child pornography laws. The photo ad of a $3,000 purse from Balenciaga’s Spring/Summer 2023 collection included a printout of the 2008 United States v. Williams decision, which ruled on the constitutionality of a federal law banning the “pandering” of child pornography. As of this writing, the hashtags #BalenciagaGate, #BalenciagaGroomers and #BalenciagaPedos appear as top search results on Twitter, with users still slamming the company after it issued back-to-back apology statements.
An anthropologist focused on betting markets talks about how to wager on the 2024 presidential race and how those markets botched the 2022 midterm elections.
"I am not aware of any significant detection of fraud on Election Day, but that's not surprising," said Paul Smith, senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center.
President Biden’s warm relationship with labor unions is under strain, as he pushes Congress to avert a looming railway strike by Dec. 9. Leaders of a dozen unions struck a tentative deal with railway operators earlier this year, but it was voted down.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy criticized a dinner meeting over the weekend between former President Donald Trump, Kanye West, now known as Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier.
The battle between Gov. Ron DeSantis and suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren will enter a courtroom Tuesday.
Former President Donald Trump, who announced his latest bid for the White House earlier this month, was joined at a dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago by white supremacist agitator Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West. CBS News political director Fin Gomez and Kevin Madden, a senior partner at Penta Group, join "Red and Blue" to discuss the fallout from the dinner.
Jiang Zemin, who led China out of isolation after the army crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989 and supported economic reforms that led to a decade of explosive growth, died Wednesday. Jiang, who was president for a decade until 2003 and led the ruling Communist Party for 13 years until 2002, died of leukemia and multiple organ failure in Shanghai, state media reported. A surprise choice to lead a divided Communist Party after the 1989 turmoil, Jiang saw China through history-making changes including a revival of market-oriented reforms, the return of Hong Kong from British rule in 1997 and Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
STORY: On an unlit street in Beirut, men wielding batons and torches take security into their own hands. Neighborhood watch, they call this. But critics see worrying echoes of Lebanon's civil war.The country's economy collapsed in 2019. The crisis has paralyzed the state and fuelled poverty and crime. Beirut suffers blackouts and can no longer afford to light many of its streets.The patrol was launched earlier this month in Ashrafieh, a well-heeled, predominantly Christian district, by Christian lawmaker Nadim Gemayel.Residents are afraid of crime, and Lebanese authorities are to blame, he says. “If they have done their duty and lit the streets, we would not have been forced to light the streets, and if they were present and hadn't allowed the country to collapse, we wouldn't have to stand in the streets today to reassure our people."Critics recall the 1975-1990 civil war, when the state collapsed, militias controlled the streets and Beirut split into cantons. Beirut's mayor Jamal Itani says he only heard about Gemayel's initiative on the news. He's afraid other neighborhoods could follow suit in a country awash with guns.“I fear that this initiative evolves and turns into clashes between parties, let's say they catch a thief from one party or people intervene with guns, then things could get out of hand in Beirut. My second fear is that other areas will also ask for this and then each area will have a group for itself managing security in their area.”Such criticisms are rejected by Gemayel, whose father, Bashir, led the main Christian militia in the civil war before he was assassinated in 1982."We are not a militia, we are not armed, we don’t have rockets or drones, we do not have (military) equipment, we know exactly our duties and our people’s needs. We are doing this to secure their most basic needs.”'Rockets and drones' are a reference to Iran-backed Hezbollah, which maintains an arsenal to fight Israel.Lebanon's other sectarian parties disarmed after the war but their influence is pervasive.Tensions are common – supporters of different groups fought deadly clashes in Beirut as recently as last year.George Samaha owns a bakery in Ashrafieh and welcomed the patrol. “When we heard about it, we were reassured because nothing is guaranteed in this bad situation we’re living in. I support this initiative, hopefully nothing will happen.”The patrol currently has 98 recruits. Gemayel says he coordinates with the security services, who are short of manpower.Like other state services, Lebanese security forces have been hit hard by a 95% currency collapse that has demolished the value of wages. The United States is buttressing them with aid, including salary support.
Jeff Saturday initially defending his clock management after Monday's game.
The game of hide and seek between Elon Musk and Apple is over. For several months now the question was when Musk would declare war with the iPhone maker and CEO Tim Cook. Since Musk took over the social network Twitter , he's been trying to find new sources of revenue.
More than 300,000 Georgians cast their ballots on Monday in a highly contentious Senate runoff race, smashing the previous one-day record of 233,000 votes set just four years ago.
A Black loan applicant in the United States is more than twice as likely to be denied a home mortgage than a white applicant, aggravating the homeownership gap between Black and white Americans, according to a new report. Although loan denials for both Black and white applicants have slowed since the 2008 financial crisis, the gap in denial rates for Black and white people applying for home loans has widened significantly. Today, 15% of Black applicants are denied mortgages, while 6% of white ap