Andrew Gillum found himself in a Tallahassee courtroom this week, indicted on wire fraud and money laundering charges related to campaign finance. Thursday in Fort Lauderdale, DeSantis again got to take a victory lap over his fallen opponent.
“I would ask a lot of the media that propped him up whether they have any type of mea culpa on that. There clearly were a lot of issues there. If you looked under the hood, you saw it. But what was presented to the public was that this guy was like the second coming,” DeSantis remarked.
DeSantis and Gillum surprised many by advancing to the General Election four summers ago, and the back-and-forth went Gillum’s way for much of the campaign until the weight of ethical issues seemed to change the campaign’s narrative.
“Never has a candidate been elevated that way by media outlets,” DeSantis said. “Certainly in the last 10 years or so.”
“And I can tell you,” DeSantis added. “If I had not won in 2018, this state would be in much worse shape, and that’s not even a question.”
DeSantis focused on the question of Gillum’s ethics down the stretch of the 2018 campaign.
“In the case of Andrew, look, he has not been honest with the voters of Florida. I asked him in that debate, and the media should have been asking him these questions. … He says he’s not under investigation. He’s been saying that. He’s the only one who says that,” DeSantis said in Jacksonville in late October 2018.
“What did he do after getting that? He turned around and gave the lobbyist exactly what that lobbyist wanted,” DeSantis added. “To me, those are ill-begotten gains that he should not have had. And what he did, doing the favor for the lobbyist, is exactly how we don’t want government to work.”
This article first appeared at Florida Politics.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2022.