The Last Man Standing — Rocky vows to fight on against Trump following Weld’s withdrawal

Contrary to national media reports that former Massachusetts governor William Weld’s withdrawal from the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday leaves President Trump without opposition within his own party, California real estate developer Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente vowed on Thursday to remain in the race through the remaining primaries.

De La Fuente’s candidacy guarantees that Republican voters in several forthcoming primaries will have a chance to express their dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s inexcusably slow and tragically inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The prescient and humanitarian-minded De La Fuente, who proactively took measures to protect residents in his two assisted living facilities in Los Angeles and San Diego while the president was still calling the coronavirus a “hoax,” polled four percent of the vote against Trump in the Illinois primary on Tuesday.

Remarkably, one out of every 25 Republican voters who bravely made their way to the polls in the Land of Lincoln voted for the little-known De La Fuente, many presumably doing so to express their anger and frustration with the administration’s slow — if not entirely glib and initially dismissive— response to this deepening health crisis.

“If it’s fair for the president to call presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden ‘Slow Joe,’” quipped De La Fuente, “maybe we should start calling the president ‘Tortoise-like Trump.’

“His administration’s initial response to this growing national and global crisis was shameful and will prove tragically costly, both in terms of human lives and a needlessly devastated economy from which we won’t soon recover,” continued the Republican challenger in a more serious vein. “Trump should be held accountable for his inaction.”

In announcing his plans to remain in the race, De La Fuente praised Weld for waging a courageous candidacy on behalf of the party’s better self. “Bill Weld waged an honorable campaign, giving Republican voters a thoughtful alternative in the early primaries,” said De La Fuente, who deliberately refused to actively campaign in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary on Feb. 11 in order to give the former Massachusetts governor a clean shot against the president.

The 65-year-old De La Fuente, who has been highly critical of the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, will be on the ballot in the Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island primaries, tentatively scheduled for April 28th.

In addition to seeking a spot on the ballot in the later D.C. and Puerto Rico primaries, the self-made Californian will also be on the ballot in the May 12th West Virginia primary, the Connecticut primary, rescheduled for June 2nd, and the Louisiana primary, which was originally scheduled for April 4, but has been postponed until June 20th due to the fast-spreading virus which has already claimed the lives of more than 10,000 worldwide, including 218 in the United States.

Believing that he should have been included in the list of candidates automatically placed on the ballot by the Secretary of State in January, the De La Fuente campaign is also considering taking legal action for inclusion on the Maryland primary ballot, which has also been rescheduled for June 2nd.

“Maryland Republicans,” said De La Fuente, “deserve an option, especially now that Bill Weld has officially withdrawn from the race.”

It was no coincidence that the highly-successful California entrepreneur, whose candidacy has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media despite investing more than $15.3 million of his personal resources in his bid to unseat Trump, compared his longshot effort to the courageous campaign waged by former Maryland Sen. Joseph I. France, a physician-turned-politician, against beleaguered Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover — another Republican president who had been tepid in responding to a national crisis — at the height of the Great Depression in 1932, a year when a staggering quarter of the American people were unemployed and hurting badly.

Hoover’s slow and highly inadequate response to the deepening depression paved the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sweeping victory in November, leading to twenty straight years of Democratic control of the White House.