Donald Trump: Ron DeSantis to announce US presidential tilt

It will see Mr DeSantis and Mr Trump go head to head for the Republican Party nomination.

A source close to Mr DeSantis confirmed the event, first reported by NBC News, would take place at 6pm Florida time on Wednesday (8am Thursday AEST).

Mr DeSantis’ announcement is expected to coincide with him formally filing a notice of his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission and be followed by a two-day fundraising blitz in Miami later this week, reported the New York Post.

An official kick-off event will take place at a later date in his hometown of Dunedin, Florida.

Polls have consistently shown Mr DeSantis, 44, to be the strongest challenger to former President Donald Trump, 76, though most national surveys have also shown the 45th president leading his closest competitor by double digits.

Mr Trump, in anticipation of Mr DeSantis’ forthcoming challenge, has repeatedly attacked the younger man for perceived disloyalty and derided him last year as an “average REPUBLICAN Governor with great public relations”.

More recently, the former president borrowed left-wing talking points to argue that Mr DeSantis had “left a wake of destruction” in the Sunshine State, to which the DeSantis-supporting Never Back Down political action committee responded by offering to help Mr Trump — a recently minted Florida resident — pack his bags for Democrat leaning California.

Since his narrow election as Florida governor in 2018, Mr DeSantis has made a national name for himself by diving headlong into the culture wars, staking out staunchly conservative positions on everything from Covid-19 vaccination mandates to the teaching of gender and sexuality in schools.

Florida voters rewarded Mr DeSantis this past November, re-electing him by nearly 20 percentage points over Democrat Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor.

In recent weeks, Mr DeSantis has mused openly about what he might do if he runs for president and is elected to two full terms.

In a speech on Monday to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando, the governor reflected on the future of the Supreme Court.

“I think if you look over the next two presidential terms, there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito and the issue with that is, you can’t really do better than those two,” the governor said.

Both those judges are considered to be right wing.

“If you replace a Clarence Thomas with somebody like a [Chief Justice John] Roberts or somebody like that, then you’re gonna actually see the court move to the left, and you can’t do that.”

“So it is possible that in those eight years, we have the opportunity to fortify Justices Alito and Thomas as well as actually make improvements with those others, and if you were able to do that, you would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter-century.”

Unlike Mr DeSantis, Mr Trump is prohibited from running in 2028 if he wins back the White House in 2024 thanks to the 22nd Amendment, which states that no one can be elected president more than twice.

Mr DeSantis will also enter the race with a sizeable war chest, as his state-level campaign funds and associated political action committees (PAC) – fundraising bodies – had racked up more than $166 million in donations as of late last month. By comparison, Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., had a relatively paltry $83 million cash on hand as of the end of last year.

This story appeared in the New York Post and is reproduced with permission.