DeSantis Draws Cheers At CPAC, Trump Hints At Presidential Run

ORLANDO, FL — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the crowd favorite at the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference held in Orlando, the largest annual gathering for conservatives in the nation.

DeSantis has ranked high in polls of Republican voters as a contender for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024 if former President Donald Trump doesn’t seek another term. But Trump hinted yet again that he plans to mount a campaign, keeping other Republican hopefuls waiting.

DeSantis spoke Thursday before an enthusiastic crowd of thousands at the conference, where the theme this year was "Awake, Not Woke."

He told Republicans they are doomed to become "second-class citizens" unless they fight back against "wokeism."

“They want to delegitimize our founding institutions, and they want to replace that with their left-wing ideology,” DeSantis said. “It’s about tearing at the fabric of our society and trying to replace it with something that will be much, much more sinister.”

DeSantis, billed as "America's Governor" at the CPAC event, criticized the Biden administration over limiting the use of some monoclonal antibody treatment found to be ineffective against the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

The governor’s biggest applause was a regular zinger about immigrants.

“If Biden is dumping illegal aliens into the state of Florida, I’m rerouting them to Delaware,” DeSantis said of Biden’s home state, CNN reported.

Meanwhile, on Saturday night, Trump continued to stoke months of speculation over his plans.

“We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,” Trump said. “We’re going to be doing it again, a third time.”

He repeated the false scenario he's adopted since the 2020 election that he was the true winner of the election and was denied the office due to voter fraud.

He then blasted President Joe Biden's foreign policy and what he called a lack of action resulting in Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week.

"A major war in Europe may very well erupt. That's how they start, exactly what's happening today," he said. "Joe Biden has turned calm into chaos, competence into incompetence, stability into anarchy. The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling, an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur."

His statements contradicted comments he made Tuesday during an interview on a conservative radio talk show, the "Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show," when he called Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions against the independent democratic nation of Ukraine "genuis."

“I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force,” Trump said on the show. “We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy. I know him very well. Very, very well.”

While DeSantis focused on Biden's domestic policies, criticizing the president's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump hammered Biden's foreign policies and described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “smart.”

“Of course he’s smart,” Trump said, doubling down on praise of the Russian leader that many other Republicans have avoided in the wake of the invasion. “But the real problem is our leaders are dumb. Dumb. So dumb.”