Rick Wilson pours cold water on DeSantis' future
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is slated to open this week in Maryland with Donald Trump, his son Don Trump Jr. and other allies of the former president being handed key speaking spots as attention turns to who will get the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
One person who won't be there making their case before the assembled conservative activists is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) who is ducking out on attending due to having other plans.
According to former GOP campaign consultant Rick Wilson, DeSantis' non-appearance at such a important stop for GOP hopefuls is a tip-off that he is not ready for prime time and, as he said on MSNBC on Sunday morning, he appears to be "running away like a scalded dog."
Speaking with the Guardian's David Smith, Wilson went in-depth on the weaknesses of DeSantis' bid for national office -- who he claimed has the "charisma of a toaster oven.”
RELATED: 'Bashing, chatter and gossip': CPAC 2023 promises a cloud of scandal and division for conservatives
According to Wilson, the supporters of DeSantis are “Culture war weirdos who believe this whole ‘woke’ thing, which is a meaningful but not enormous part of the party. National Review writers who are desperate, desperate, desperate, desperate, desperate for anything other than Trump so they can say, ‘See, we’re past that. We can go back to normal.’"
He warned, "I have some bad news for them. Nobody’s ever inviting them back in the room in the Republican party of tomorrow, just as nobody’s ever inviting guys like me back in the room. It’s over. The party’s run by the mob, not by the intellectuals, and it’s never going to go back. Once a movement becomes a populist movement dominated by the grassroots of the base, it never goes back to being a thoughtful, intellectually driven movement.”
In that vein, Wilson continued DeSantis is having to depend on "liberal Republican hedge fund billionaires from New York. The open borders, globalist US Chamber of Commerce are going out of their way to help DeSantis! The irony is DeSantis thinks he can have the most elite support and then trick the Maga base into thinking he’s a rah-rah like Trump. It just defies imagination.”
You can read more here.