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Popular podcast host Joe Rogan said he thought DeSantis would make a good president.
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The Republican governor has defended the podcast host in the past.
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DeSantis is up for re-election in 2022 and has not said whether he is running for president.
The high-profile Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just got bigger.
Joe Rogan, the the world’s No. 1 most-listened to podcaster, said Tuesday he thinks the 43-year-old Republican governor would “work like a good president.”
“What he’s done for Florida is admirable,” Rogan said on an episode of his “Joe Rogan Experienceshow when Daily Wire actress Gina Carano asked who he would like to see run to the White House in 2024. He described DeSantis as “not perfect” but said he was “standing up for freedoms”.
Rogan also referred to President Joe Biden, 79, as a “dead man” when discussing the state of the US.
Rogan’s comments are likely to add to speculation that DeSantis would run for president in 2024, although the governor has repeatedly said he is focusing on his run for re-election in Florida in 2022.
Earlier this month, DeSantis beat former president Donald Trump in a straw poll of self-proclaimed conservative congressmen on the Western Conservative Summit who were asked who they would like to be the 2024 presidential candidate. A Morning Consult poll out Wednesday also showed growing support for DeSantis.
DeSantis tends to dismiss questions about 2024 when asked, though he said last week that he believed the presidential speculation was meant to detract from the losses Democrats are expected to incur in the midterm elections. November.
Rogan is just the latest high-profile figure to praise DeSantis.
Last week, expert Piers Morgan called on Republicans to “dump” Trump and support DeSantis, and earlier this month, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said: he would probably support DeSantis for president in 2024.
DeSantis’s COVID response caught Rogan’s attention
During his podcast, Rogan said his support for DeSantis was largely due to the governor’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.
DeSantis banned schools and workplaces to force workers to get vaccinated as a condition of employment, and to force children to wear masks in schools. He stressed that the state should target the most vulnerable populations.
“I feel like what he did for Florida, a lot of people hurt him a lot, but in the end he was right,” Rogan said. “He was right about killing, he was right. And when it comes to protecting all vulnerable populations, he was right about the distribution of monoclonal antibodies.”
DeSantis sparked national backlash when he insisted that COVID patients take monoclonal antibodies, even though federal officials said they were ineffective against the Omicron strain of the coronavirus circulating at the time. DeSantis shot back that most patients and doctors don’t know what strain of the virus they had.
Rogan holds several politically liberal positions, including on abortion and drug legalization. But he has been criticized for his willingness to interview controversial people on his podcast and for saying that young and healthy people did not need the COVID-19 vaccine. (He later backtracked on the comments, saying he wasn’t against the vaccine and encouraging people to get it.)
Rogan appeared to broaden the controversy in his podcast on Tuesday.
“There was this weird gaslight shit that went on,” he said, “where people equated freedom and say the word freedom to love right-wing bigotry and hate is so strange.”
DeSantis, in turn, has defended Rogan before. In February he said: Rogan shouldn’t “kow to the mob” and apologized after a video montage went viral of Rogan making racist comments on his podcast.
Read the original article Business Insider