Former President Donald Trump released a lengthy scorched earth statement on Thursday reminding the political world — and Fox News — that he’s still around, the reminder coming after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis destroyed his Democratic opponent on Tuesday by nearly 20 points in a win so convincing that many celebrated the governor as the future of the Republican Party.
In a clear fighting mood, Trump blasted Fox News for going “all in” for DeSantis, calling him an “average” governor while repeating a nickname first mentioned at a rally last week, “Gov. Ron DeSanctimonious.”
Trump claimed in the statement that DeSantis came to him “in desperate shape in 2017,” asking for his backing over his formidable GOP primary opponent Adam Putnam, suggesting DeSantis “was politically dead” at the time. The former president said he “fixed” DeSantis’ campaign, “which had completely fallen apart,” and got him by Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum “by having two massive Rallies with tens of thousands of people at each one,” before dropping somewhat of a bombshell, claiming that as president he stopped the 2018 election from “being stolen” from DeSantis.
“[A]fter the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win,” Trump wrote. “I stopped his Election from being stolen…”
Democrat-run Broward County was certainly a problem child when it came to tallying election results, along with neighboring Palm Beach County — an odd occurrence that seems to play out in any number of Democratic precincts across America.
Like magic, after the 2018 election, then-Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes “submitted her resignation, ending a 15-year tenure full of botched elections, legal disputes and blistering criticism,” as characterized by the Sun-Sentinel, and DeSantis replaced the long-time supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, Florida became a beacon for the rest of the nation on how to run a smooth, efficient election that –egad! — can deliver results the night of the election!
DeSantis squeezed by Gillum in 2018 by just 32,463 votes, while now-Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., beat Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson by a razor-thin 10,033 votes.
While it may not equate to, as Trump suggested, the election “being stolen,” the Sun Sentinel reported after the 2018 election:
Broward’s vote counting was an outlier among the state’s 67 counties, taking a long time to complete. For days, Snipes wouldn’t say how many ballots were outstanding and uncounted and her office wasn’t reporting updated results as frequently as the law required.
And there were repeated hiccups during the recount period, including Snipes’ acknowledgment on Saturday that her office couldn’t find 2,040 ballots that had been included in the first vote count but not in the machine recount of state elections.
She said she was sure they were somewhere in her office, probably mixed in with other ballots.
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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