Billionaire political activist George Soros believes the 2024 Republican presidential election will be a slugfest between former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, which he believes will lead to the party’s demise.
“Trump has devolved into a pitiful figure, constantly lamenting his loss in 2020,” the Hungarian-born leftist said at the Munich Security Conference on Thursday. “Large Republican donors are deserting him in droves. DeSantis is astute, cunning, and ambitious. He will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.”
Soros, the Democratic Party’s largest donor in the 2022 election cycle, warned that a DeSantis victory in 2024 would be disastrous for Republicans. “This could persuade Trump, whose narcissism has become a disease, to run as a third-party candidate. This would result in a Democratic landslide, forcing the Republican Party to reform.”
While Soros joked that he might be “just a little bit biased” against Republicans, the election scenario he hopes to see play out isn’t too far-fetched. Trump’s popularity among Republican voters has dropped in the aftermath of the 2022 congressional midterm elections, in which candidates endorsed by the former president performed worse than expected. DeSantis, who was re-elected governor by a historic margin and led a Republican ticket that helped the party retake control of Congress, is currently polling ahead of Trump as the GOP’s leading 2024 candidate.
Although the governor has not officially entered the presidential race, Trump has already begun calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” and accusing him of being a “RINO globalist.” Trump even boosted a social media post accusing DeSantis of “grooming high school girls” during his brief stint as a teacher decades ago.
Trump reportedly threatened to form his own political party in 2021, and he hinted in December that he might run as a third-party candidate in 2024 if Republican leaders did not support him sufficiently. As Soros predicted, such a candidacy would almost certainly ensure the Democrat’s victory because Trump and the Republican nominee would split conservative votes.
