Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and a serious contender for the
Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has said France would not
put up a fight if Russia invaded, as it did in Ukraine.
“A lot of other places around the world, they
just fold the minute there’s any type of adversity,” DeSantis told
reporters at a press event at South Florida University in Tampa on Wednesday.
“I mean can you imagine if he [Vladimir Putin] went into France? Would they do anything to put up a fight? Probably not.”
The governor also began the event by angrily
attacking students present on the stage with him for wearing masks
against Covid-19. “You do not have to wear those masks,” DeSantis said, pointing a finger.
“I
mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything and we’ve
gotta stop with this Covid theatre. So if you want to wear it, fine,
but this is ridiculous.”
Federal authorities have relaxed mask guidance in much of the US but the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 950,000 – and more than 70,000 in Florida alone.
Anyone French who saw DeSantis’s remark might remember the bad jokes (“cheese-eating surrender monkeys”) and Orwellian doublespeak (french fries renamed “freedom fries”) that followed Jacques Chirac’s refusal to back the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Amid much online mockery of DeSantis’s remarks, Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter, tweeted: “He went to Yale.”
DeSantis
also went to Harvard, to study law. Before entering politics, he was a
Jag or US navy lawyer in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. He regularly polls
second in surveys of likely contenders for the Republican presidential
nomination, behind Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, after dissing the whole of France, he had praise for Ukrainians fighting the Russian invasion.
“And
so those folks are stepping up,” he said, “but it’s, there’s a lot of
problems I think between now and then and I think unfortunately it’s
going to end up very, very ugly over the next weeks and months.”
He
also offered his view of Putin’s psyche, the evils of communism and
whether the US should develop its own energy resources, at the expense
of federal lands and efforts to fight the climate crisis, in order to
lessen reliance on Russia.
“Look at what’s going on and someone like
Vladimir Putin,” he said. “You know, I analogise him to basically an
authoritarian gas station attendant.
“You look
at their country, it’s a hollowed-out country but for the energy. And
yes they have legacy nuclear weapons, which makes them much more
dangerous than if they didn’t have those.
“And so [Putin is] being fueled because America
is not serious about energy independence. Right now Europe is not
serious at all. So Europe is funding this guy. So he has the ability now
to go in and flex muscle.”
DeSantis also said Republicans under Trump “funded a lot of weapons for Ukraine … that has helped them put up a fight”.
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