DeSantis Announces Replacement For Sen. Marco Rubio’s Seat
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced his choice to replace Sen. Marco Rubio who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as secretary of state.
Reports on Wednesday said DeSantis is naming Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to the seat. Previous reports said that she was among his top considerations.
Moody has been an important ally of DeSantis in the state and has worked alongside him to advance his agenda as governor.
When asked about potentially taking on the role on “Fox and Friends First” in November, Moody said, “I have my hands full here as attorney general, and I’m incredibly focused on this job, working on behalf of Floridians, making sure I’m protecting the autonomy of the state and pushing Washington out of our business and holding them accountable. Of course, I love … being in leadership, working with President Trump, working with Governor DeSantis. And I hope to continue working on behalf of Floridians.”
Initially, Trump and Senators Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) endorsed his daughter-in-law and former RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump to succeed Rubio.
“I would say that my track record speaks for itself. Maybe having the last name Trump is just a little bit extra. I’m always happy to have it,” Lara Trump said Sunday on Fox News. Three years ago, Lara Trump and her husband, Eric, moved to Florida. Previously, she considered running for the Senate in her home state of North Carolina, the WSJ noted.
“It is something I would seriously consider,” she added in an interview this week with The Associated Press.
However, she later withdrew her name from consideration, Fox News reported.
“After an incredible amount of thought, contemplation, and encouragement from so many, I have decided to remove my name from consideration for the United States Senate,” she wrote on X.
Rubio and Trump were rivals during the GOP presidential primaries in 2016 but have since mended fences.
Last year, Rubio said that because President Joe Biden opted to allow his Justice Department to indict former Trump, he opened the door for reprisals from a future GOP president.
“You think this ends here? The next Republican president is going to be under tremendous pressure to bring charges and indict Joe Biden, his family, his crackhead son, whoever,” Rubio said during an interview on Fox News. “The pressure is going to be extraordinary.”
His comments came as Trump was en route to a federal courthouse in Miami at the time to be arraigned following a 37-count indictment from special counsel Jack Smith, who U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to investigate the former president’s handling of classified documents.
Rubio went on to say that the country has undergone a “cultural hysteria” in the decades following the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. became the sole superpower in a “unipolar” world, suggesting the country frittered away its status and clout by moving manufacturing off-shore while allowing the left to destroy traditions like two-parent families and safe neighborhoods.
“I mean, we can do whatever we want, can be as decadent as we want in our society, in our culture,” Rubio said. “We can break our politics. We can take our institutions and weaponize them for political purposes on both sides.”
“And now reality is catching up, and it’s hurting us badly,” he said. “And today is frankly just a symptom of a much bigger problem which we’ll talk about here, and that is we no longer live in that world.”
Earlier, he said of Trump’s classified docs indictment, “These documents of this nature don’t belong at Biden’s garage, they don’t belong on Hillary Clinton’s server, they don’t belong at Mar-a-Lago, but there’s no allegation here, even if you read the indictment nowhere does it say ‘and as a result, the national security of the United States was harmed in this way.'”