… and God asked Ron, “Really?”

By BRUCE LOWITT

Ron DeSantis said Monday he dropped out of the Republican presidential race because “God told me I should have listened to (Donald) Trump when he said he’d already been anointed the GOP candidate, and I always do what God tells me to do.”

The Florida governor said he thought the former president, seeking to regain the office he held before Joe Biden won the 2020 election, “was laying it on a bit thick” when Trump showed a video on Truth Social that said he had been divinely chosen to lead the country. DeSantis also said, “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”

In the video, the narrator says that “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

DeSantis initially said he was suspending his campaign because he couldn’t “ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources. We don’t have a clear path to victory.”

But on Monday he insisted “God said my bullying tactics, my banning books, my opposing women’s health care, my rewriting history, my hating immigrants, my attacks on Disney and especially my wearing idiotic lifts in my stupid boots made me what God called ‘a loser from the get-go’ and that I should stop embarrassing both myself and God and just go home.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this because what I’m about to mention could get me in a lot of trouble and, uh, cause a bit of, I don’t know, turmoil or confusion, but God said She’s kind of peeved about … yeah, turns out God’s a She. Who knew? And She said She’s, um … okay, I don’t want to get into the LBGTQ+ business. Never mind. Forget everything I just said.”

DeSantis, once seen as the strongest opponent to the former president, finished just ahead of Nikki Haley in the Iowa caucuses but a distant second to Trump.

On Sunday, DeSantis endorsed Trump over Haley, his lone remaining challenger heading into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

DeSantis said he endorsed Trump’s candidacy “because if I don’t, God told me I’ll wind up in Hell. When I told God I already was in Florida, She told me, ‘You think that’s Hell? That’s nothing. I can make you Trump’s vice president.’”