Ron DeSantis promises a prosecutor crackdown | CPT PPP Coverage

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promised his supporters that he would “crack down” on federal prosecutors if elected president next year.

The governor held an event Monday in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, just two days ahead of the first official GOP primary debate where DeSantis is set to face off against a crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls. As the distant runner-up to former President Donald Trump, DeSantis has been considered by some as the strongest competition facing the former president for the 2024 Republican nomination.

While speaking from the stage Monday, DeSantis touted his administration’s efforts to enforce law and order in Florida, claiming that prosecutors in Democratic-led cities who are elected to office decide that “they’re not going to enforce laws they disagree with.”

“And so, what ends up happening is the criminals start to rule the roost, and people aren’t safe anymore and they start fleeing the cities,” DeSantis said. “Well, we’ve had two of those types of prosecutors in Florida say they were not going to enforce laws that they don’t like. I removed both of them from their posts.”

“You can’t be a successful country if every urban area is a total hellhole,” he continued. “So we’re going to crack down federally, we’re going to make sure they’re enforcing the laws and upholding the civil rights of their citizens. And we will never ever let people like BLM [“Black Lives Matter”] burn down cities in this country ever again.”

Earlier this month, DeSantis suspended Orlando State Attorney Monique Worrell, accusing the city’s top state prosecutor of “incompetence” and being lenient on crime. Worrell is the second duly elected Democratic prosecutor to face suspension from DeSantis’ administration in a year—State Attorney Andrew Warren, the former top prosecutor in Tampa, was fired in August 2022 after signing a statement alongside 90 other elected prosecutors who promised to not enforce restrictions on abortion and gender therapy in Florida.

DeSantis’ 2024 campaign has struggled to gain momentum, and recent polling suggests that businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is gaining on the governor for second place in the GOP lineup. Some Republicans have warned that DeSantis’ agenda—which has largely focused on a fight against “wokeness” in the U.S. government—is too polarizing to win national support.

Seemingly in response to the disappointing polling numbers, DeSantis has restructured his campaign staff three times in the past month or so, and his recent focus on issues like crime may be a sign that he is shifting his messaging from the war on “woke.” A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Republican primary voters found that messages of “law and order” were much more attractive than fighting against liberal policy agendas.

Despite facing repeated attacks from Trump on the campaign trail—and firing back a few of his own—DeSantis has also defended the former president from his list of criminal charges, and previously called the Justice Department’s investigations against Trump a “weaponization” of the federal government.

In a series of memos published online by a political firm associated with DeSantis’ supporting super PAC, Never Back Down, allies of his campaign suggested that the governor spend Wednesday’s debate defending Trump if the former president gets assailed by former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and saving his own attacks for Ramaswamy.

The debate is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. EST Wednesday and will be hosted at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Newsweek reached out to DeSantis’ campaign through his website portal Monday night for comment.