DeSantis vs. Abbott: Nobody wins

By BRUCE LOWITT

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, enraged over what he called “Greg Abbott’s stealing my whole immigration thing,” has threatened to run for governor of Texas against him in 2026.

Abbott’s order positioning a floating barrier of large buoys on the Rio Grande as well as installing razor wire to keep migrants from entering the country “is just his attempt to outdo my new law restricting the employment of undocumented immigrants and forcing them out of my state,” DeSantis said.

“It’s disgraceful,” he added. “Besides, it’s something I’d do, except I can’t run barbed wire around 1,350 miles of Florida coastline. I mean, I’ve got the money to do it – my legislature will give me anything and everything I ask for – but the folks up and down the beaches along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean would shit a brick.”

DeSantis, elected in 2018 and again last year, is term-limited from running for governor of Florida in 2026. “But as soon as my current candidacy for president winds up in the toilet, which is where it’s obviously heading, I’ll finish my job of racializing Florida, then move to Texas and defeat Abbott,” he said.

“Y’know, there’s a Miami there, too, in the Panhandle. I’ll set up my campaign headquarters there and ask my 521 new neighbors to join my staff – as volunteers, of course. And I’ll run for president in 2028, when that fat you-know-what will be in jail and out of the picture.”

In May, Abbott announced he had deployed a new Texas Tactical Border Force, with Blackhawk helicopters and C-130 turboprop military transports, “to help intercept and repel large groups of migrants trying to enter Texas illegally,” and said this latest addition to Operation Lone Star also would be authorized “to separate preteen children from their parents in order to be trained as low-income laborers and leased to major companies in the state.”

In June, DeSantis announced the reestablishment of the Florida State Guard, equipped with boats and helicopters, which he said would give him “a great opportunity to expand our capability to help people in times of need or disaster, as well as to act as my personal armed combat-ready militia, to squelch dissent, close libraries and give new career opportunities to Florida’s great Christian nationalist men and women.”

When Abbott responded by deploying the buoys and razor wire and authorizing the Texas National Guard to arrest and assault “any person who looks like an alien, and I don’t mean just martians and all them space creatures,” DeSantis countered by pointing out that “since anyone in Florida can now carry a gun or any other kind of weapon, they are now permitted to use it against anyone they suspect of being woke, a felon, an immigrant or otherwise disagreeable.”

Former president Donald Trump stated on his Truth Social platform, “These two governors are OUT OF THEIR MINDS, DOING THINGS LIKE THAT !!!”

But according to one of Trump’s many still-unpaid lawyers who spoke on condition of anonymity, when Walt Nauta, the former president’s valet, body man and document mover and concealer, testified before a federal grand jury, he said, “Mr. Trump asked me, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ and that he’d probably have beaten Joe Biden if he’d done it.”

Trump is the clear front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and seems guaranteed to win it at next May’s GOP convention regardless of how many indictments he faces for assorted felonies.

According to the latest Neurocognitive-Delirium Poll, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Ryan Binkley, Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Larry Elder, Will Hurd, Asa Hutchinson, Perry Johnson, Francis Suarez and Vivek Ramaswamy all are within two percentage points of each other and all are far behind Trump – but ahead of DeSantis, whose latest ranking shows him with a negative score, meaning even his family won’t vote for him.