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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) rocked the house at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa on Friday.
The wildly popular governor received a rock star’s welcome at the summit, where he quipped, “I want to, on behalf of the State of Florida, wish President Biden a speedy recovery from Covid – and I also want to wish the United States of America a speedy recovery from Joe Biden.”
DeSantis welcomed students to “America’s beachhead of freedom – the free state of Florida!”
He added, “We’ve stood up against the corporate media, against bureaucrats like Fauci, and against Brandon himself [Joe Biden] to keep the state of Florida open! To protect people’s jobs, to save businesses – we rejected mandates for Covid jabs. And in the state of Florida, because of our efforts, it is illegal to force a student in our school system to get a Covid shot.”
DeSantis is a favorite among Republicans who would like to see President Donald Trump pick the Florida governor as a running mate in a hypothetical 2024 presidential election.
Additionally, the Student Action Summit straw poll handily demonstrated the power of a potential Trump and DeSantis ticket. Trump won the lion’s share of support, with an incredible 78.7 percent of respondents indicating that they would vote for the 45th president in a 2024 presidential primary.
DeSantis came in second with 19 percent of the vote. Without Trump, the straw poll found that DeSantis would be the top choice for president, with the governor beating out a field of Republican contenders at 87 percent of the potential primary vote in that scenario.
DeSantis spoke to the energetic youth attending the summit, highlighting the importance of educating children to appreciate and understand America’s heritage.
“We want to teach our kids to understand what it means to be an American,” DeSantis stated.
He continued, “The one common thread for everyone is you are all going to be called upon to exercise the duties of being an American citizen, and that means something. It means something because this is a unique country that people will go across shark-infested waters to get to, they will crawl over broken glass, barefoot, to get to – it’s a country where people have never hesitated, from the very beginning, to put their lives on the line and indeed, to give their lives, so that we can be free.”