Ron DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday afternoon after realizing he no longer had a clear path to the Republican presidential nomination. He made the announcement public through a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, in which he officially endorsed Donald Trump, who quickly reacted to the news.
After generating a lot of initial expectations with his candidacy, even breaking book sales records, the governor of Florida was gradually losing ground, and it all became very real as he finished in a very distant second place in Iowa, a state in which he had invested much of his hopes to achieve a boost that would allow him to compete with the former president.
With the polls against him heading into New Hampshire and South Carolina, DeSantis chose to withdraw and leave the race as a head-to-head between Trump and Nikki Haley.
Trump retires nickname “DeSanctimonious:”
“That name is officially RETIRED!”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 21, 2024
“Now, over the past many months, Casey and I have traveled across the country to deliver a message of hope that decline is a choice and that we can, in fact, succeed again as a nation. Nobody worked harder, and we left it all out on the field. Now, following our second-place finish in Iowa, we’ve prayed and deliberated on the way forward. If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome, more campaign stops, more interviews, I would do it. But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources if we don’t have a clear path to victory. Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign,” he expressed in the aforementioned video published on X.
Donald Trump’s reaction
To make peace, the first thing the former president did when faced with the news was to decree the end of the nickname with which he baptized DeSantis throughout the campaign: “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
Immediately afterward, he claimed to be “very honored” to have the support of the governor of Florida, at times his most direct rival during the race. “I look forward to working together with him to beat Joe Biden, who is the worst and most corrupt president in the history of our country,” he added in dialogue with Fox News Digital.
#BREAKING | Donald Trump's campaign command releases statement on Ron DeSantis dropping out. pic.twitter.com/B6NbaUFjfJ
— VOZ (@Voz_US) January 21, 2024
Minutes later, the Trump campaign published a statement calling for unifying the GOP behind their candidate. Of course, he also took the opportunity to criticize his only obstacle to achieving the Republican nomination for the third consecutive time.
“Nikki Haley is the candidate of the globalists and Democrats who will do everything to stop the America First movement. From higher taxes to decimating Social Security and Medicare and to open borders, she represents the views of the Democrats more than the views of Republicans. It’s time to choose wisely,” he said.
Nikki Haley’s reaction
The former governor of South Carolina first highlighted her now-former rival and then turned her attention back to New Hampshire, where she hopes to achieve a decent result that keeps her aspirations to be the eventual candidate alive.
“Ron DeSantis has been a good governor, and I wish him well. (...) So far, only one state has voted. Half of its votes went to Donald Trump, and half did not. We’re not a country of coronations. Voters deserve a say in whether we go down the road of Trump and Biden again, or we go down a new conservative road,” she wrote in a statement released Sunday.
