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David: What's up everybody? David Bozell with ForAmerica at the ForAmerica headquarters. Competition is a beautiful, wonderful thing. This campaign between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis is gonna be great. And in case you didn't realize it, you saw the first pot shots going back and forth this week.
I'm interested on how these guys are going to compete with each other based on their policy promises to the American people. And you got a first glimpse of that this past week. Now, two days ago, on January the 31st, Ron DeSantis announced that the Florida budget will no longer include funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion plus critical race theory ideologies in any of... the Florida state bureaucracy.
Okay. All DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida... All right, let's roll that:
DeSantis:
David: Terrific. And everybody stands up and applauds.
And it's a terrific policy position to take. And DeSantis is understanding that the candidate that is the candidate for parents is gonna get a huge leg up in this campaign, a huge leg up. And all of conservative intelligencia was applauding him this week for this stance--for removing funding for DEI and CRT bureaucracies across the state of Florida, but it sounded awfully familiar to me.
And I remembered that five days prior Trump said the exact same thing, nearly word for word.
Five days prior, Trump announced his education platform and right out of the blocks he announces that he will cut funding for any school or federal program, which is the same as what DeSantis was suggesting, vis-a-vis bureaucracies— what DeSantis calls "bureaucracies," Trump called "Federal Programs."
Trump said, "we will cut funding for any school or federal program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or any other racial, sexual political content onto our children."
Let's roll that again. This was five days prior.
Trump:
David: Did DeSantis just copy Trump's platform? I mean, he could have...
DeSantis is a smart guy, right? He's done a terrific job in Florida. All of us who have been watching or, if you don't live in Florida, everyone's got the t-shirt and the hat... "make America Florida," that kind of thing. So this is not necessarily to knock DeSantis, but the fact of the matter is before everyone just gets way too excited about... DeSantis moving ahead in Florida... we've gotta be fair to Trump.
Trump made that announcement and probably--if I know anything about his campaign apparatus--taped it before he released it five days prior to DeSantis' announcement. But he probably taped it a couple weeks prior, though a lot of these, a lot of these campaign videos, these campaign platform videos, if you notice, Trump always typically wears the same thing.
You know, that jet-blue suit with a jet-red tie, but a lot of the background is similar, so he is probably taping a lot of these all in one day. So, just go— I'll just guess that he taped this a few weeks prior. So, just understand: as great as DeSantis' announcement was, it'll be extraordinarily exciting to watch that occur in real time in Florida and to get to see how it could be done and see the benefits of that.
Just understand Trump had that exact same platform and released it first.
So you gotta— if you're gonna be excited about DeSantis' announcement, you gotta be excited about Trump's too. So, I think it's just gonna be extraordinarily exciting to watch. We're conservatives, right? We're not communists. Competition makes us all better.
I think one of the... mistakes that the conservative movement has made is that we're obsessed with all being on the same page and saying the same thing and having the right talking points and just sticking to it. And we're not gonna be able to get good policy across the finish line unless we stick to the same talking points.
That's garbage.
That's garbage. We ought be competing with each other for the best message, the most persuasive message.
And these two gentlemen are doing it in real time and I think that's gonna be fascinating to watch, to see. I've always thought that Trump's advantage going into 2024 — against his Republican rivals, -- a lot of what they promise — he has already done.
But one Achilles heel he might have is education. The entire Republican party, the Congress missed an opportunity. An opportunity to reimagine public education completely. School choice, et cetera, is all part of that stew.
But the facts don't lie. On January the 26th, President Trump announced as a part of his major platform, "we will cut funding for any school or federal program pushing critical race theory."
Five days later, Ron DeSantis announces that Florida will cut funding for any bureaucracy in the state of Florida promoting CRT and DEI. These are nearly identical statements.
In fact, just to give you an example of the drama... I tweeted out a couple days ago this exact comparison, the first comment was, "well, DeSantis one, Trump zero." The second comment was, "so DeSantis doesn't have any original ideas and is just copying what Donald Trump says he'll do. Got it." And that is just exhibit-A of the campaign ahead of us. And again, competition is gonna be a wonderful thing as these two duke it out for the Republican nomination.
Okay, guys, over and out. Enjoy the weekend.