Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hopes to eat into Donald Trump’s seemingly insurmountable +43 lead by announcing a game plan to eliminate partisanship from the U.S. Intelligence Community and the FBI.
“We’re going to have all these deep state people, you know we’re going to start slitting throats on day one,” DeSantis said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire.
He argued that he wanted to get “soft Trump voters” not to vote for Trump. He wanted to show he was tougher than Trump by saying that members of the Mexican cartels would be “shot stone cold dead.”
Trump Talked But Did Not Deliver on ‘Draining the Swamp’
Trump talked about “draining the swamp” while he was president; however, his appointees including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein became key players in the flawed and unfounded Mueller investigation.
He also appointed CIA Director Gina Haspel, who thwarted his effort to declassify documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
“I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Trump loyalist Kash Patel told Real Clear Investigations in February 2021.
DeSantis clearly hopes with his latest choice of words to get those soft Trump voters who are concerned about the politicization of the U.S. government by Democrats and liberal Republicans to consider him.
Ron DeSantis Previously Talked About ‘Slitting Throats’ at Defense Department
This was not the first time DeSantis talked about slitting throats. He previously talked about doing so at the Defense Department.
“I think the idea that you take a flag [officer] or general officer who recently retired and put them as [secretary of Defense], I think it is a mistake,” DeSantis said. “You know, they may have to slit some throats. And it’s a lot harder to do that if these are people that you’ve trained with in the past or that you know.”
DeSantis continued: “So we’re going to have somebody out there, you know, be very firm, very strong, but they are going to make sure that we have the best people in the best positions, and there’s not going to be necessarily prior relationships that would cloud that judgment.”
DeSantis’ Choice of Words Offends Some
DeSantis’s choice of words, however, may have had the opposite effect on some.
“If I was in charge of his PR, I would have said, ‘Don’t use that terminology,’” said Norm Olsen, a GOP primary voter from Portsmouth, N.H., told New Hampshire Public Radio, about DeSantis’s comment about “slitting throats.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a public-sector union that endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, took issue with the DeSantis comment.
“Gov. DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful, and disqualifying,” AFGE President Everett Kelly said. “These public servants deserve respect and commendation from our nation’s leaders. No federal employee should face death threats from anyone, least of all from someone seeking to lead the U.S. government.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
From 19FortyFive
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