GOP Senator John Cornyn Tweaks DeSantis Again, Touts Zelensky’s ‘Answer’ on Ukraine Aid for Him
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) touted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “answer” for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis again on Tuesday, a week after critiquing the presidential prospect’s first definitive statement on the war in Ukraine.
“Zelensky has an answer for DeSantis,” tweeted Cornyn, aping a headline from The Atlantic, and then sharing Anne Applebaum’s paraphrase of his answer: “He [Zelensky] didn’t want to appeal to the hearts of Americans, in other words, but to their heads. … [T]his was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won’t have to fight them anywhere else.”
Zelensky has an answer for DeSantis:
“Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY “didn’t want to appeal to the hearts of Americans, in other words, but to their heads. … [T]his was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won’t have to fight them… https://t.co/HmPJSjrTCl
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) March 21, 2023
Last Monday night, DeSantis replied to a questionnaire about the war in Ukraine offered to various prospective GOP presidential candidates by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson by insisting that “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” is not one of the United States “many vital interests.”
His remarks drew swift pushback from a number of Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Cornyn, who said he was “kind of surprised” and even “disturbed” by DeSantis’s answer.
“I mean, Gov. DeSantis is a veteran. He’s a smart guy. I think he’s a been a very good governor and I don’t understand him saying that Ukraine isn’t important to the United States,” said Cornyn before adding that he hopes the governor “feels like he doesn’t need to take that Tucker Carlson line to be competitive in the primary.”
Republican voters have slowly grown more skeptical of the U.S.’s substantial efforts to assist the Ukrainians over the past year as figures such as Carlson and former president Donald Trump, DeSantis’s chief competitor for the Republican nomination, have urged them toward that position.
