Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) on Wednesday jumped his feet into the debate over which 2024 GOP presidential candidate is most dangerous to America: former President Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Jolly said DeSantis, the governor of his home state, posed a “much bigger threat.”
“Donald Trump is a brutal, transactional politician who will walk into a room, try to crush the Constitution, probably fail, and be arrested by the courts,” Jolly said on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House.” “It leads to violence. He himself is a unique danger.
“But in Ron DeSantis you have someone who carries the same fragile vanities of Donald Trump, the paranoia and executive abuse of Richard Nixon, a vision of religion, church and state like Pat Robertson, and the low-key methodologies of Attorney General Bill Barr,” the former congressman told anchor Nicolle Wallace.
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Trump could “try to overthrow the nation in a single day,” Jolly continued.
DeSantis “will do it by a thousand cuts”.
“And those thousands of cuts include the rollback and tearing of our 100-year-old culture into a pre-civil rights era, the normalization of a view of race and gender and progressive ideologies, and the LGBT issues that we continue to struggle with. ‘trying to integrate into the United States,’ Jolly warned.
“Ron DeSantis stands in the way of a culture that is moving forward,” he added, although he acknowledged that the two men posed “a real danger to the future of our country.”
Jolly left the GOP in 2018 to protest Trump.
Last month, he said he was considering leaving Florida with his family because of the extremist policies DeSantis has enacted.
“Why would I want to raise my children in an environment where they are ashamed to embrace diversity of thought and diverse cultures?” Jolly asked on MSNBC at the time.
“I want my children to be exposed to as much diversity as possible, and at home my wife and I can orient our family around the set of values that are right for us and prepare our children to make decisions that are right for them by ultimately as adults,” he said. “It’s not allowed in the state of Florida. You’re ashamed of it, you’re not welcome.