DeSantis sinks Florida Republican’s plan to help pay Trump’s legal bill
A day after ending his campaign for the White House and tepidly endorsing Donald Trump, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, sank an effort to use his state’s funds to pay off the former president’s legal expenses.
DeSantis promised to veto a bill from the state senator Ileana Garcia, a Republican who sought to effectively dedicate up to $5m from Florida’s state budget to help Trump cover his legal costs. The former president faces 91 criminal charges and assorted lawsuits in various jurisdictions.
DeSantis shared a link on social media to a Politico article headlined “Some Florida Republicans want taxpayers to pay Trump’s legal bills”, and he added the caption: “But not the Florida Republican who wields the veto pen.”
Garcia’s proposal had won an endorsement from the elected official who oversees Florida’s state finances, Jimmy Patronis, a Republican. But Garcia withdrew her proposal shortly after DeSantis came out in opposition of it, FloridaPolitics.com reported.
She said in a statement that having
Trump in the White House again would be a gain for Florida, where the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located. “And anything we can do to support Florida presidential candidates, like President Trump, will not only benefit our state but our nation,” said Garcia, who argued that Trump’s criminal charges were an example of “weaponizing the courts”.
DeSantis ended his White House campaign on Sunday after finishing a distant second to Trump in the Iowa caucuses. Polls suggested DeSantis was on track to finish in third far in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, far behind Trump and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
Endorsing Trump, DeSantis wrote: “It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”
Trump thanked DeSantis. But he told Fox News it “was highly unlikely” that the Florida governor would have a role in a second Trump administration.
“I have a lot of great people, and I
have great people that have been with me right from the beginning,” Trump said on Sunday.
Trump’s criminal charges center on his attempts to forcibly overturn his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020, on illegally retaining government secrets after he left office, and on hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him.
He is also a defendant in civil litigation accusing him of illicit business practices as well as raping magazine columnist E Jean Carroll, with the latter allegation having been deemed substantially true by a judge.