Ramaswamy Hits DeSantis for Being ‘Outsmarted by Mickey Mouse,’ Slams Haley for Inviting Disney to SC

@VivekGRamaswamy / Twitter
Nick Gilbertson

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy bashed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for “getting outsmarted by Mickey Mouse’ and fellow presidential candidate, former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), for inviting Disney to South Carolina.

In a video shared to his social media account on Wednesday, the biotech entrepreneur criticized DeSantis for not “paying attention to the details” in his battle with Disney. Specifically, he noted that the former Walt Disney World governance board, which the Associated Press noted was controlled by the entertainment giant, implemented strict agreements that defanged DeSantis’s hand-picked board in March:

The fact that after he got his political stunt – Ron DeSantis loves to do stunts – after he does the stunt, gets the cycle of conservative media credit for it, [he] doesn’t pay attention to the details. Disney gets the better of him and ultimately strips that governing board, that Ron DeSantis put in place, of all of its power giving Disney the last laugh in the end. I don’t think you should be president of the United States if you’re going to get outsmarted by Micky Mouse either. And I think if you want to sit across the table from [Chinese President] Xi Jin Ping, you gotta actually have a spine, you got to actually understand what you’re doing, not just be solving for media cycles. 

Ramaswamy also referenced legislation, which appears to be Florida’s Stop Social Media Censhorship Act of 2021, that DeSantis enacted  granting the Walt Disney Corporation one of its “special privileges.” He said that DeSantis later rolled the measure back and claimed it as a victory:

Florida passed a political anti-discrimination statue that said if you’re operating a website, an internet company – and Disney does operate internet companies underneath it – that you couldn’t engage in political discrimination. But wait, Ron DeSantis signed into law an exception for anybody who owned a theme park bigger than 25 acres in the state of Florida. That is just plain naked dirty crony capitalism, signed into law by Ron DeSantis and then he rolls that back later claiming those special privileges should have never have been signed in the first place.

The entrepreneur’s comments came as he weighed in on Haley’s invitation for Disney to set up shop in South Carolina. 

“SC’s not woke, but we’re not sanctimonious about it either,” she wrote in a social media post on Wednesday – an apparent reference to former President Donald Trump’s nickname for the governor, “Ron DeSanctimonious,” and his battle against the media giant. 

Ramaswmy said he “got a kick out of Nikki Haley’s comment” but emphasized he does “not think it is a good idea to condone Disney’s toxic behaviors,” adding:

Their disastrous decisions to advocate for indoctrinating children with gender ideology and transgenderism and sexuality at the age of six – not such a good idea and I don’t think that you should implicitly bless that in the state of South Carolina or elsewhere

He argued that Haley was trying to take a shot at DeSantis, but she “picked completely the wrong way to do it.”

“If you want to get to the heart of the matter, focus on the fact what Ron did wrong,” he said.

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