In his video announcing the end of his 2024 presidential campaign, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race in the most fitting way imaginable: by falsely attributing a quote about failure to the late British political leader Winston Churchill.
The candidate suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination on Sunday after just barely placing a distant second in the Iowa GOP caucuses last week.
DeSantis started his campaign with lots of Republican star power and funding, placing most of his focus on waging a so-called “war on woke.”
But a late entrance, poor polling, massive campaign layoffs and a stale personality ultimately led the governor to release a video announcing his campaign suspension and decision to endorse his political rival, indicted former President Donald Trump.
“Winston Churchill once remarked that, ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts,’” DeSantis said in the video, repeating the quote in his post on X. “While this campaign has ended, the mission continues.”
But there is just one problem: Churchill never said that.
The former UK prime minister and staunch monarchist is also often quoted saying, “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm,” according to the International Churchill Society, which studies the life and works of the late conservative politician.
“We can find no attribution for either one of these, and you will find that they are broadly attributed to Winston Churchill. They are found nowhere in his canon, however,” the society stated on its website. “An almost equal number of sources found online credit these sayings to Abraham Lincoln ― but we have found none that provides any attribution to the Lincoln Archives.”
The society says it has based its conclusion “on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers.”
The DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on the Republican governor’s decision to falsely quote a British leader while ending his run for president of the United States.