DeSantis Campaign Press Release - Ron DeSantis and South Carolina State Senator Josh Kimbrell on the Doug Wagner Show

Des Moines, IA - Ron DeSantis and South Carolina State Senator Josh Kimbrell today joined Doug Wagner live for an interview in-studio. The highlights are below.

Listen to the full interview here.

On slaying the deep state and stopping the swamp:

As governor, I've showed how it's done. I mean, I've eliminated agencies, just like Governor Reynolds has here. Florida has the lowest percentage of bureaucrats per capita in the entire country. I have 3 million, 2-3 million more people than New York state. Our budget is half the size of New York with one of the lowest bureaucrat per citizen ratios in the country. And yet, people that move from New York will say you have better roads, you have better services, you have better education. So, much of government is not necessary. It just grows and grows. So we have actually shown how to do it in Florida. Now federally, I think it's a constitutional crisis, what's happened with the administrative state. The founding fathers created three branches of government. They did not create a fourth branch of government, a bureaucracy that basically imposes its will on us without our consent and has even been weaponized against us. So you're going to go in as President, I'm going to use all the levers of power to bring the administrative state to heel... Some of these bureaucrats, they laugh at elections. They don't care who gets elected. They're going to do whatever they want to do. That is not what the Founding Fathers intended. And you need somebody that understands the Constitution. You need somebody who has the focus and discipline to be able to claw this power back to the people.

Senator Josh Kimbrell on why he’s in Iowa campaigning for Ron DeSantis:

Well for starters, to defend the honor of my state, and secondly, to make sure we get a true leader for America. You know, Governor Haley's running around talking about how she made South Carolina such a great red state. We are red state. We used to be redder than Florida. We're probably not redder than Florida now, we're right there with them still. But most of the conservative reform --whether it's school choice, or passing tax cuts, or deregulation -- all that happened after Nikki Haley's tenure as governor, not because of it. And you talked a moment ago, the governor talks about reconstituting the country, reconstituting the government, re-constitutionalizing, making sure these bureaucrats aren't running your lives. One thing that people forget, one of the biggest threats to the country is not only the bureaucrats, it is the big business in bed with big government. We've seen companies like Blackrock, we've seen companies like Disney, we've seen companies like Citigroup all got their precious woke agenda. And you got to be willing to stand up to that to like the governor of Florida has. My governor's out there, former governor, [Nikki Haley] is out there hanging out with BlackRock and paling around with Jamie Dimon from Citi Group. And I don't want people around the country to think we in South Carolina are on board with this corporatist agenda. We believe in the free enterprise system, we believe in limited government, and that's why I want the president to be Ron DeSantis.

On supporting farmers and the agriculture industry:

This ESG agenda, this environment social governance, they talk about things like global warming, and they blame agriculture for a lot of this. And so these policies applied to agriculture will create a food crisis in this country. It will decimate agriculture. They want to talk about how you farm, they want to talk about how you use your land. All of everyone in Iowa that is involved in agriculture can know, when I'm President, all this ends on day one. We're going to throw all the ESG out. We're going to empower farmers to do what they do best. We're also going to crack down on states like California that are trying to tell Iowa Pork Producers how they should be producing pork. That's not the role for a liberal state to be telling the states in the Midwest. So help is on the way. But this is a dangerous agenda. And it's not just a matter of having a couple of misguided policies. They are going for the jugular when it comes to agriculture. Look don't worry about me. Like, I want people eating meat, I want people -- we got to do that. I mean, so some people on the left don't like that. We know it's important, and that's something that you can count on me for.

Senator Josh Kimbrell on Ron DeSantis’ strong border policies:

The reason every state's a border state is because of what Governor DeSantis did. I mean, let's be honest, people who sat in the ivory towers of Chicago and New York could do so with impunity because they didn't have all these people flooding into their town until Florida started sending those migrants there. We had to pay the price for it. Our state, we just passed legislation to basically deputize our state law enforcement to go after illegal immigration. Every state's a border state, the only person who can actually build the wall and get it done is Governor DeSantis. The former president talked about, he wanted to make Mexico pay for the wall, but he now says there's no mechanism to do so. But there's a mechanism to do so, the governor has pointed that out. You just got to be thoughtful and understand before you speak how you're going to execute a policy, and I think that's what makes Governor Ron DeSantis a great leader.