Donor Claims He’s Dropping Ron DeSantis, but Things Aren't as They Seem

A new report echoed by Maggie Haberman (the original is by the far-left Financial Times) is claiming that a major donor is dropping plans to back Ron DeSantis in 2024. A closer look reveals that there’s a lot more to the story, though.

Haberman, who has long sourced reports directly from the Trump camp, pushed a quote from Thomas Peterffy in which he states that DeSantis has become too extreme on social issues. He cites “book banning” and abortion as the two reasons he’s supposedly backing away.

The red flags just jump off the page when you read that quote. One, what kind of Republican donor is turned off by a candidate being pro-life? Two, the “book banning” line is straight out of the left’s playbook, and it also happens to be false. No books are banned in Florida. Any parent can choose to go buy any book they’d like their child to read. That Peterffy would even mention that says a lot about what’s really going on here.

Regardless, a little digging shows that this is almost certainly an opposition operation. As I said, the fact that Haberman is pushing this is instructive given she’s been described as a “Trump whisperer.” Despite her left-wing leanings, the former president has granted her interviews and his team has fed her many stories over the years.

Sure enough, it turns out that Peterffy is a Trump donor who is a member of Mar-a-Lago. I also can’t find any evidence that he ever had plans to fund a DeSantis presidential bid. Those facts start to bring his motivation into view. Namely, he likely put out this quote for a very specific political reason, i.e. to back the Trump camp’s narrative that DeSantis is floundering with donors.