Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is not only a rising star in his party, but he has become a fundraising powerhouse as well.
But hosts on ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday hinted that DeSantis’ fundraising was due in part to his scamming donors.
In an appearance on the show, Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as White House Director of Strategic Communications and Assistant to the President in the Trump administration in 2020 and is now a CNN contributor, followed up a discussion about DeSantis’ fundraising prowess by suggesting: “What a lot of these apps and websites do is you click to give once and it actually signs you up to recurringly give. It is so unfair; it is a grift, it is terrible; it is horrible.”
But DeSantis hit back on Griffin’s claim, calling it completely untrue.
“I got accused by some of these people on one of these shows about, oh you know, he’s raising all of this … and they tried to say that we had auto-donate, where it keeps going every month. We do not do that,” DeSantis said on Tuesday.
“We do not do that auto because we don’t want people to have these charges if that’s not something they didn’t agree with,” DeSantis noted further, as reported by Newsbusters. “So they tried to act like I was doing that and then some of these media went and said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s not doing that.’ So they were lying about that.”
“At the end of the day, we have folks, some people are on a fixed income, very limited, and they will donate a certain amount and that’s very meaningful. Not everybody has the capacity to write these big (checks) … we would never do automatic unless you personally as the contributor, press that button,” he explained.
“And so I think it’s very important, particularly as Republicans, when you’re raising money amongst your own people, that you’re doing it in a way that has honesty. And so if my name is being used to trick people into providing donations for something that they don’t necessarily want to do, that is definitely wrong,” he concluded.