Remember Ron DeSantis? The Florida governor has spent the last couple years in the news in part because of his homophobic policies and for tussling with the biggest employer in his state. But he was also famous for running for president. At one point people seriously thought he could trounce Trump. Imagine that! He didn’t, and how. On Sunday he finally ended his disastrous campaign. He did so in appropriately humiliating fashion.
DeSantis announced the end of his presidential bid with a video posted on social media, which ended with him claiming to quote Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” DeSantis liked the quote so much that he even put it in the caption.
Problem is: Churchill never said that.
So who did? Per The Atlantic, the line comes from an old beer ad. Specifically it hails from a Depression-era one for Anheuser-Busch. Over the decades, the language from the ad has mutated and wound up falsely attributed to arguably the United Kingdom’s most beloved prime minister. Whoops!
The DeSantis team hasn’t commented on the blunder. The video and its caption are still up. Perhaps they’re hoping no one notices that Meatball Ron and his team didn’t bother Googling the quote. Had they done that they would have discovered it’s one of the most common fake Churchill quotes out there, alongside another popular whopper: “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.”
DeSantis fake-quoting Winston Churchill ought to interest his most prominent bully, Donald Trump. After all, he doesn’t seem to know World War II already happened.
(Via The Atlantic)