Florida state representative and top DeSantis ally Randy Fine has announced he no longer supports Gov. Ron DeSantis for President due to what he perceives as the candidate’s insufficient actions to combat antisemitism, especially on college campuses. Instead, he is now throwing his support behind Donald Trump.
“I love his words. His actions have broken my heart,” Fine wrote in an op-ed published in the Washington Times. “Until a few weeks ago, Governor DeSantis said almost nothing. And worse, he did almost nothing.”
Fine is the sole Jewish Republican in the Florida state legislature. He has also been one of DeSantis’ top allies.
“I am the only Republican Jew elected to the Florida Legislature, and you will find few people in the Legislature who have championed Mr. DeSantis more,” he wrote in the piece. “I endorsed him before he was the Republican nominee for Governor. I was his Jewish Outreach Chair. I carried his bills to take on Disney and end child mutilation in the name of fake gender “science.””
He also chaired DeSantis’ Jewish outreach efforts for his governor races, and, according to him, wrote every piece of legislature DeSantis has discussed involving Jewish issues.
NEWS: Top DeSantis ally @VoteRandyFine —FL legislature’s only Jewish Republican — switches sides & endorses Trump, blasting the gov. for too too little action on antisemitism. He says Trump is better on Israel
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) October 24, 2023
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But none of that cooperation was enough for Fine, who thinks DeSantis has been utterly disappointing in his pro-Jewish actions.
In the op-ed, Fine criticized DeSantis for failing to break ground on a Holocaust memorial he helped the governor obtain funds for, saying it took DeSantis “longer to commemorate the deaths of six million Jews than it took the Allies to stop the deaths of six million more.” He also attacked DeSantis for not cracking down on alleged neo-Nazi activities in the state of Florida, citing the assault of a Rabbi and a group demonstration that involved draping banners saying “Gas the Jews” over a freeway.
But most crucially for Fine, DeSantis allegedly took little action to oppose a spate of anti-Israel demonstrations and actions on Florida’s state university campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which is causing him to move on. Fine said when he “begged” DeSantis to sign a bill he wrote expanding hate speech laws to include antisemitic speech on college campuses, and when he asked him to enforce the existing bill against Palestine supporters, DeSantis demurred and left it up to colleges to decide.
He also cited a time when DeSantis did not speak out against a candidate running against fine who he alleges was an antisemite.
By contrast, Fine praised Trump for moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, for having “green-lit” Israel to annex the Golan Heights, for signing the Abraham Accords peace treaty, and for allegedly preventing Muslim nations from attacking Israel.
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