If members of Villagers for Trump learned anything during their rally Thursday night it was this – President Trump is steadfast in his resolve to make America great again and Florida will play a pivotal role in the 2020 election.
So said President Trump’s former campaign managers, Corey R. Lewandowski and David N. Bossie, who made a stop in The Villages to address a packed-house crowd at the Mulberry Grove Recreation Center and talk about their latest book titled “Trumps’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency.”
“We get a chance to talk to the president a lot and it’s an amazing experience for the two of us,” Bossie said. “But the reason that we spend our time going out across this country to places like this is to make you understand that he has not lost one bit of the resolve that he’s had – the fire in his belly – in fighting for every single one of you and our ideals and beliefs. That is what he’s doing every single day.”
Lewandowski labeled Trump a “special” president and said what we saw at the beginning of his administration was people who wanted to control him and make him more “presidential” in the way he conducted himself.
“Sometimes he says things and maybe you cringe a little bit, but what we know is he says what he means and he means what he says,” Lewandowski said. “The difference with Donald Trump, and the media hasn’t figured this out yet, is he made some promises during the campaign and then he came to Washington and he actually kept his promises. And they were shocked. And by the way, so was Congress.”
Lewandowski said the mainstream media also created the illusion that Trump’s staff was in disarray.
“There was no chaos in the White House,” he said. “It just didn’t exist.”
Lewandowski said Trump made some changes to his staff because he needed the right kind of people around him.
“I want people around the president who actually like the president,” he said. “I want people around the president who support the president’s agenda. And he has a right to have those people around him.”
Lewandowski also joked about people who suggest he should ask Trump to stop using Twitter.
“Never!” he said. “I will never do that because, number one, he’s never going to stop. And number two, I love it. I love when a president talks directly to the American people.”
On a more serious note, Both Lewandowski and Bossie made it quite clear that they see Florida as one of the key states for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
“We’ve got a very short window, ladies and gentlemen,” Lewandowski said. “We’re coming into an election cycle that unlike in 2016 when Dave and I were running the campaign, we’re not sneaking up on them this time. They’re not going to take us for granted and think Trump can’t win. They will use every tool, including the media, to stop him from getting re-elected. So we need Florida more than ever and we need your help.”
Bossie said one of the great things the Sunshine State has going for it is Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was sworn in earlier this week.
“There is no governor in this country closer to the president of the United States than Ron DeSantis,” Bossie said, adding that it would have been much harder for Trump to carry Florida in 2020 if Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a “leftist” had won the governorship.
As for 2016, Bossie said it’s hard to imagine but Trump actually still would have defeated Hillary Clinton, whom he labeled as “Crooked H,” even if he had lost Florida. But he echoed Lewandowski’s earlier sentiments and said 2020 will be a much more traditional election, meaning gaining the support of Floridians is even more important than before.
“We need people registering voters between now and Election Day,” he said, pointing out that Trump thinks of Florida as his “second” home. “Everybody here who knows somebody who moves into this community needs to be registered to vote. It is literally the difference between winning and losing.”
Bossie said if people don’t believe that, all they have to do is look at the midterm elections, where the Democrats won back the majority in the House of Representatives.
“They went out using their anger and hatred of this president as a vehicle to generate the energy to register voters,” he said. “They beat us in over a dozen House races by less than a thousand votes each.”
As for the continuing debate over the border wall between the United States and Mexico that’s led to an ongoing government shutdown, Lewandowski said he’s made an effort to try to understand things from the Democrats’ perspective.
But then, he said, he thinks of Ronil Singh, a police officer in California who was gunned down by an illegal immigrant. Or he thinks of 22-year-old Pierce Kennedy Corcoran, the son of a fire captain in Tennessee who was killed in a head-on crash with an illegal immigrant who had no driver’s license or insurance. Or he thinks about Juan Abrego-Chavez, an illegal alien who was convicted of raping a child for the second time on Thursday.
“He was convicted twice. Not once, but twice of molesting children,” Lewandowski said. “He was deported and came back in the country and did it again. I don’t understand how we’re not protecting the American citizens.
Lewandowski also used the term “warmongers” to describe the Democrats in Congress.
“When the president says, ‘I want to bring our men and women home who are serving overseas because we can’t be the police force of the world anymore,’ the Democrats say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” Lewandowski said. “And when the president is saying, ‘We’re going to protect Americans by making sure we know who comes into the country,’ they say, ‘No, you can’t limit who comes into the country.’”
But, Lewandowski said, a higher authority has made it clear that the president does, in fact, have that ability.
“Every president since World War II has had that authority,” he said. “The Supreme Court ruled in a 9-0 decision that the president actually can limit who comes into the country. But our country has gone so far in the other direction and I’m fearful that it’s not getting better.”
Finally, Lewandowski said, he frequently gets asked to give Trump a message as he travels the country and it’s one that he thoroughly enjoys delivering to the White House.
“I get asked to tell the president ‘thank you’ and ‘keep fighting,’” he said. “That’s what he does and that’s what he’ll continue to do.”
