Making his pitch Saturday to Iowa, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed to stand strong against America's decline under President Joe Biden.
"We're either going to win this election and turn this country around, or this nation is going to continue to be in a state of decline; and it may decline to the point where it could be a irreparable," DeSantis told supporters in Iowa in a speech aired by Newsmax.
"Look, there's some people that say, you know, maybe just nibble around the edges. Maybe it's fine to just slow or manage the decline a little bit better, and [if] that's what you think I'm not your guy.
"I have no interest in managing our nation's decline. I want to reverse our nation's decline, and that requires us to win."
DeSantis hit the Biden administration for failing on the mission with its "woke military" agenda and its struggle with recruitment.
"Many veterans no longer are excited about having their kids or grandkids join our nation's military," DeSantis said. "Why? Because they see that the military has been indulging in things like social experimentation, political ideology, a woke agenda, which is taking your eye off the mission in focusing on things that are simply not the core functions of the military.
"Morale is low. Warriors have been driven out of the services, and recruiting is at a generational low — the lowest point since after the Vietnam War."
The inability to "deter" Chinese aggression is going to be a tragedy, DeSantis warned.
"That's not sustainable for our country, if we want to remain a free and prosperous country," he said. "So one of the things I will do as president is, as commander in chief on Day 1, we rip the political agenda out of the military, take the woke agenda out, and we restore the military to its proper mission."
DeSantis denounced the "invisible tax" of inflation on America's working class as being government "induced" under Biden.
"The borrowing and the spending and the printing benefits the people that are connected to the political class, so they benefit," DeSantis said. "And you pay and that has got to stop.
"So we are going to take all the red tape, all the bureaucracy that Biden has put in and others, and we are going to rip it out on Day 1.
"We are going to free up this economy, particularly our small businesses to do their thing. We are going to expand our ability to produce our own energy here in the United States. I don't want to rely on anybody else for energy, and we will be fully energy independent."
About NEWSMAX TV:
NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!