Governor Ron DeSantis: “President Trump has been consistent and correct that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.”
Mario: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has done many efforts to get people home, more than 1,500 people back to America. The Governor joins me right now. Governor, thank you for being here. Your reaction to what has taken place?
**Governor Ron DeSantis**: Well, President Trump’s policy has been consistent and correct that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, and his actions last night put force behind that policy in a way that I think is going to be very beneficial for the U.S. interests and the broader world. Think about it, under President Biden, Iran was on a surefire path to a nuclear weapon. Now, thanks to President Trump’s actions, Iran going nuclear is a pipe dream at this point. So, it was the correct decision, it was expertly executed, and hats off to everybody that’s been involved in that. And I think that we understood when the first war broke out with Israel and Iran, this was going to have implications for our country one way or another. And in Florida, we knew just as a matter of fact, we had a lot of our residents that were over in Israel as these ballistic missiles were raining down. Ben Gurion Airport, as you mentioned, was shut down, and so how do you get these people back? Now, we rescued many people after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. We’ve also rescued Floridians and other Americans from instability in Haiti, and so we sprung into action. We were able to get 1,500 during the first week out of Israel and we’re now running flights. We’ve had hundreds of people repatriated back to Florida. I was in Tampa the other day greeting people in the wee hours of the morning, and it’s a difficult situation. If you’re a college student over there studying abroad or if you’re there with your family, all of a sudden you’re in this midst of a situation which is very, very dicey. So, those operations are ongoing and we’re going to continue to help rescue our fellow Floridians and fellow Americans when they need help.
Maria: Thank you for those flights from Tel Aviv to Tampa, very effective. Governor, when you were in the House of Representatives, you also studied the Iran conflict. Do you expect retaliation?
**Governor Ron DeSantis**: Well, Iran has always been an asymmetric threat, Marie, and that was one of the reasons the nuclear problem was such a big issue because they’re militant Islamists, and so using nuclear weapons, even if there was a devastating response against them, that may be an inducement for them to use it, given their radical ideology. I would imagine a conventional response is not going to be very effective against the United States. They are not a match for us there, but I do think that they will try to work through their proxies to deliver more terrorism in the region. And as you mentioned earlier in your show, President Biden let in massive numbers of people during his administration. Are we to believe that Iran, who they view us as the great Satan, that they just didn’t want to take advantage of that? I think it’s probably the case that they did, so I think it’ll be more of an asymmetric response. I don’t think that they can match the United States conventionally.