Florida’s Governor is telling New Hampshire Republicans that he would have fired the Defense Secretary were he President.
Ron DeSantis was answering a question about Lloyd Austin’s health woes on Wednesday, when he expressed sympathy for the 70-year-old battling with prostate cancer, but suggested the lack of disclosure for the medical episode would have been a dealbreaker in his White House.
“I feel sympathy that he has health issues but for him to not tell the Commander in Chief, if that happened to me as President, I would fire the Secretary of Defense as a result of that,” DeSantis said in Derry.
“This is the chain of command. We have different contingencies that happen. There has got to be accountability,” he added.
President Joe Biden did not fire Austin, of course, and nearly three weeks out from the secretary’s hospitalization, it’s pretty clear he won’t.
DeSantis believes Austin’s non-disclosure reflects poorly on the White House.
“I don’t think it reflects well on him. But what does that say about the President of the United States that no one thought that he needed to know? Or maybe there was no reason, they thought, to let him know that the Secretary of Defense was in the ICU.”
The Governor went on to say Biden “is not in charge,” repeating his previous argument that “the president of the United States is effectively whoever is feeding the teleprompter on a daily basis.”
He said he would be a “new sheriff in town,” and would be “a President that is very disciplined, methodical, strategic about how to use the levers of power to be able to effectively ensure that we govern ourselves in this country because right now the bureaucracy thinks it can do what it wants.”
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