readout on the florida governor s standing in the 2024 race and the uphill fight to catch donald trump. new reporting this hour on why he said what he said. plus, mike pence is doing it today, tim scott is doing it, so is ron desantis and francis suarez, but donald trump is not. most are walking in parades, but not the former president. he s giving more evidence he s running a very different kind of campaign. no labels says they want to give voters a third-party alternative, but some critics wonder if what they really want is to deny joe biden the presidency. i m dana bash, let s go behind the headlines and inside politics. we start today with that old saying, honesty is the best policy. at first blush, that might seem like what an operative for the ron desantis super pac is doing, stating the obvious, that things in the desantis campaign are not going so well. listen to steve cortes and his assessment of how his candidate is doing. look, right now in national polling
are at 4. the desantis campaign has just released a video making his formal announcement. let s take a look. the federal government makes it harder for families to make ends meet. and the president flounders. but decline is a choice. success is attainable, and freedom is worth fighting for. writing the ship requires restoring sanity to our society. normalcy to our communities, and integrity to our institutions. truth must be our foundation. and common sense can no longer be an uncommon virtue. in florida, we prove that it can be done. we chose facts over fear, education over indoctrination, law and order over rioting and disorder. we held the line when freedom hung in the balance. we showed that we can and must revitalize america. we need the courage to lead and the strength to win. i m ron desantis, and i m running for president to lead our great american comeback. bret: more on that in a bit. governor desantis now becomes the main challenger to former president trum
being old. do that on television, ok? i said to see you do it on television. i don t want to dislike you. i can t help it. sandra: begin with the media writing off ron desantis s bid for the governor even before he joins the primary field. i m sandra smith in new york. a lot of puns off the top alert there, but we do have a hot show coming up. john: yes, no question about that. all right. let s get cooking here. john roberts in washington. this is america reports. after months of speculation, and several visits to early primary states, ron desantis will make it official not with the usual campaign kick-off rally but in a live audio only interview with the ceo of twitter, elon musk. sandra: we are just hours away from that. marc thiessen standing by whether desantis s entry will shake up the race and peter doocy with the naacp growing war with desantis. how will desantis s rollout play out tonight? what are we and anticipating? from hot and humid miami, a bit of a
trillion could soon approach the size of the defense budget. let that sink in, neil. president biden is calling for more taxes on the rich. he speak recently in virginia beach. i want to make it clear, i m going to raise some taxes. any of you who are billionaires out there, you re going to stop paying 3%. not a joke. biden met with kevin mccarthy just once since he became speaker and with a debt of over $31 trillion, many republicans are concerned about potential cuts in national against, a time when the biden administration is arming ukrainian forces with billions in american weapons and with the threat from china increasing. the 2022 and 2023 defense budgets are 3% when the kennedy administration was spending 9% of u.s. gdp on defense, building up the arsenal which the pentagon says is aging and is needed upgrades to the tunes of billions ever dollars. and jfk cut taxes and shortly after his death. that was then. lucas thank you very much. i raised this issue with jo
world. wolf blitzer is off today, i m brianna keilar, and you are in the the situation room. let s go right to ukraine, as we follow the pivotal ballots for bakhmut, and growing concerns it could fall to the russians very soon. melissa bell has our report from the war zone. reporter: bakhmut still stands, says the ukrainian military out of sight any sign of life driven underground. what is like life for the civilians, for the soldiers? what life? what, what life? you know, the soldiers are doing their work, which is quite and civilians are trying to survive. there s no water, there is no electricity. reporter: this was bakhmut in august when the siege had just begun. this is bakhmut seven months on. the city is empty, people are afraid to go . empty, people are afraid to go out. every day new destruction. it s better not to go outside writing dr. elena from inside the town. cnn met her and other nurses on christmas eve, not quite happier times, but certain l