Ahead of Wednesday night’s debate with Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis wasn’t shy about his needs from his supporters, asking them to help “reach our goal of raising $100,000 in donations before this final GOP debate night before the Iowa Caucus comes to an end.”
To that end, the DeSantis campaign included an essay, in which the candidate held forth about an issue deemed to be key to his supporters: American fighting forces compelled to defend the transgender movement against their will.
“I am fighting tonight at the debate—and every day—to restore the freedom and glory that our country used to stand for. Back then, we could ask young men and women to stand up and fight in our proud Armed Forces, and they would volunteer to do it,” DeSantis asserts.
“What are we asking these young Americans to fight for now? A country full of so much woke indoctrination that children are being told genders aren’t real and their dad may be their mom? Being taught to question whether they want to stay in the bodies they were born in? It’s disappointing and outrageous.”
Transgenderism has been a durable trope for DeSantis during this campaign and even before it began.
In 2023, he waded into the controversy about Bud Light beer, accusing the company of “trying to push the transgenderism” when using Dylan Mulvaney in an advert.
He signed a bill in 2021 banning transgender athletes from interscholastic girls’ and women’s sports competitions. And the next year, he defended the state’s Parental Rights in Education law as a way of fighting “injecting those matters like transgenderism into the classroom.”
While he hadn’t connected the military and transgenderism previously, he had weighed in repeatedly on drag queens’ influence on the armed forces, saying this summer that they contributed to an enlistment crisis.
“Now we’re in a situation where a lot of these veterans are coming up to me saying, ‘I don’t know that I want my kids or grandkids joining today’s military.’ Why? Because they’re taking their eye off the mission. They’re focusing on things like social experimentation, ideology, woke agenda, pronouns, drag queens, all these in our own military. Are you kidding me?”
Will DeSantis get his $100K tonight? That remains to be seen. But in his pre-debate pitch, he’s traveling familiar ground.
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