Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) traveled to the Iowa State Fair with former President Donald Trump over the weekend, where he explained to Fox News why he would be voting for the former president over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Gimenez is the only member of Congress who was born in Cuba.
“I supported the president. I think he’s the right person for the job. Like I told the people of Iowa, I came from another country. I had to flee my country. I see many of the same things that happened in my own country of Cuba,” Gimenez told Fox News Digital on Sunday. “Not exactly, but some signs of the same things that are starting to happen here.”
“I certainly don’t want, you know, this country to go down that path,” he said, referring to communism. “And I think the one person that can reverse the path that we’re on, which is, in my opinion, a disastrous path, is President Trump. And so that’s the message I delivered to the people of Iowa. I’m kind of unique in that sense that I’m the only one there that wasn’t born here. And so I have a different perspective. But the reception that he got was extraordinary.”
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Gimenez also spoke out against Trump’s ongoing legal troubles with the Manhattan DA and the Department of (In)Justice. The former president has been indicted three times, and could potentially receive a fourth indictment from prosecutors in Georgia.
“Americans are patently fair. They want fairness, they want justice. And they just don’t see that happening right now,” Gimenez said. “They see what [is] reminiscent to me of a Third World country. You know, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, one way he won the presidency was basically by jailing all of his opponents.”
Gimenez compared Ortega’s methods of winning the presidency to Biden’s attempt at jailing Trump. “And so, is President Biden taking a, you know, a page out of Ortega’s playbook by trying and throwing as much as he can against probably his chief rival? No, not probably his chief rival, putting his chief rival in jail?” Gimenez continued.
The Florida congressman argued that all other Republican candidates for president are at a disadvantage already because Trump’s base will never leave.
“The base is with him, the base will stick with him,” he said of Trump. “I believe there’s 35, 40% of the Republican base that will never leave. … And, you know, that puts everybody at a disadvantage because he’s starting out at 40% and everybody’s starting zero.”
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