DeSantis Defends Tuberville’s Freeze on Military Promotions

Nikki McCann Ramirez
·2 min read
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Ron DeSantis is doing CPR on his campaign, and there’s no Republican spin room quite like Fox News. Amid a discussion of campaign drama and tanking polling, the Florida governor, a Navy veteran, told Fox’s Bret Baier that he supported Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s freeze on military promotions — because pronouns and drag queens?

“Do you support Senator Tommy Tuberville from Alabama blocking the military promotions [over] Pentagon policy, abortion policy?” Baier asked.

“I do. Because I think the Pentagon is violating the law,” DeSantis said, referring to the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing service members, veterans, and dependents for travel expenses related to abortion and reproductive health care.

“I think it plays into a larger problem that we’ve seen in the military. You have a lot of civilians forcing them to engage in political and culture issues that are detracting from [the] mission. This is one of them, but [also] the pronouns and the drag queens and all those other things. We need to get the military back on focusing on mission first,” he added.

Sen. Tuberville has used his position as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to stall more than 270 military promotions over his opposition to the DOD’s abortion policy. Leaders and even retired generals have warned that the vacancies in high ranking postings, including the commanding officer of the U.S. Marines, is affecting the military’s readiness.

The DeSantis campaign has floundered in recent weeks, a New York Times/Siena College survey released on Monday has the Florida governor 37 points behind frontrunner Donald Trump. Despite attempts at a “campaign reset” and firing more than a third of its staff in July, donors are becoming increasingly skeptical of DeSantis’ ability to pull his presidential bid back from the brink, and are worried that his fixation on culture war politics is derailing his appeal to voters.

“I don’t think it’s the campaign’s fault at all; it’s his,” longtime Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who recently dropped his support for DeSantis’ presidential bid, previously told Rolling Stone. “Every time he opens his mouth, he has a tendency to — shall we say — think out-loud, and he clearly doesn’t understand the game… When you get into these culture wars the way that he has, the vast majority of people don’t understand what they are.”

DeSantis was asked about Rollins’ comments by Baier, and called the criticism “nonsense.”

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