Republican Donors Abandon Trump In Favor Of Ron DeSantis

A new report suggests that big money donors on Wall Street are abandoning Donald Trump in favor of his protege, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has been coy about his future political ambitions, but tensions have been mounting between the Florida governor and the Florida president for quite some time after DeSantis started gaining ground in potential 2024 presidential polling. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Donald Trump has not yet told us whether or not he is actually running for president again in 2024. And another one of his proteges has also not told us whether or not he's running in 2024. And that would be Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis, DeSantis has molded himself in Donald Trump's image. He ran for governor here in the state of Florida by praising Donald Trump in his ads. So this guy is about as Trumpy as they come. But even though neither man has firmly declared whether or not they are or are not running wall street, big money, Republican donors on wall street seem to think that DeSantis is the man. And in fact, they're abandoning Donald Trump, according to multiple recent reports, both from Bloomberg and CNBC in favor of Mr. DeSantis, what's happening is that you have all of these big time wall street donors who in the past 2016 at least gave a lot of money, millions of dollars to Donald Trump.

And then they backed off in 2020, not all of them, but a lot of them did. And only 2% of the money Trump raised in 2020 actually came from these wall street donors. But now that Ron DeSantis is on the scene, they are flocking to him in droves. One of them giving $5 million, just a couple months ago to a PAC that supports Ron DeSantis. And of course you have other individual millionaires and billionaires giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to DeSantis his campaigns and his political action committees. All of whom used to be loyal Trump donors, but they've moved on. Uh, it's really interesting here. I have to read this quote. This is from, uh, Thomas, uh, TEFI chairman of interactive brokers. Uh, it says Ron DeSantis is my favorite man. He does much more substantial planning. He thinks about how he wants to implement things.

He gives himself time to think it through. Wow, that's interesting. Right. Um, except for all of that is totally false. You know, maybe, maybe all you wall street types ought to leave wall street every now and then, and actually come down here to the state of Florida and see how things are going. Uh, it's not so great by the way, the man is absolutely run rough shot over this state. He has allowed COVID to take it over. He's doing nothing to protect sensitive environmental areas, which is leading by the way to a more cases of toxic algae along Florida's coast here, which in turn costs us economically because it reduces tourism. So the guy has been a disaster, no matter which way you slice it, not to mention his, uh, social issues that he's trying to gain a conservative ground with, you know, allowing people to run over protesters with their cars, banning transgender athletes from playing sports, even though that wasn't even a, an issue anywhere really, but he, he did it anyway to throw red meat to his base.

And now of course his investigation into Facebook, oh, let's see if they interfered with the election. They didn't. So he's, he's saying the right things, you know, to, to drum up the Republican base. But in terms of being an actual leader, doing these things that I just read that this donor says, he said, he's not again, take a, take a trip down here to Florida and you'll see just how bad things are like Rhonda sands. This is a great example of what not to do when you get power, but these Republicans love him. Why? Because unlike Donald Trump, he does think before he speaks, he doesn't go out there and say all these horribly racist and terrible and sexist things that Donald Trump says. So with DeSantis, these donors get a much more mild version of Trump with the same policies, because at the end of the day, that's all that matters.

You know, whether it's a never Trump Republican like Cheney or Kinzinger, or whether it's a subtler version of Trump, like Ron DeSantis, you get the same policies with every single one of them. Same thing with Trump himself, same policies, right? There's really no policy arguments amongst those conservatives. What is different?