‘God Saved His Life So He Could Save the World,’ Randy Fine Says of Trump, Who Now ‘Needs My Help’

Sen. Randy Fine is running for Congress to help Donald Trump save the world, he says.

“God saved his life so that he could save the world,” Fine said, referring to the president-elect on the Dec. 13 edition of WNZF’s Free For All Fridays, “and since he says he needs my help to make that happen, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Fine did not say from what the world needs saving.




Fine is among the nine candidates running in the special election to replace U.S. Rep Mike Waltz in the sixth Congressional district, which includes all of Flagler and portions of St. Johns, Lake, Volusia, Marion and Putnam counties. Trump named Waltz national security adviser, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.

The Jan. 28 special-election primary has drawn three Republicans other than Fine, who : Aaron Baker of Sorrento, west of Sanford, Donald Browning of Weirsdale, north of The Villages, and Ehsan Joarder of Brooksville. Three Democrats are running in the heavily Republican district: Purvi Bangdiwala of Daytona Beach, George A. “Ges” Selmont of Elkton, and Josh Weil of Orlando. The race has also drawn independent Terry Randall of Arlington, Tenn., and Libertarian Party of Florida candidate Andrew Parrott of Ocala. A write-in, Chuck Sheridan of Merritt Island, is also running. The general election is on April 1.

Trump endorsed Fine, giving him a potentially insurmountable advantage when combined with Fine’s current platform in the state Senate, a position he is allowed by law to hold until the April 1 election, half-way through the state legislative session. Fine has been taking advantage of the platform, filing a fusillade of ideologically incendiary bills in attempts to bait headlines.

Bangdiwala’s relative proximity aside, none of the candidates has so much as a remote political connection to Flagler County. Several, including Fine, have none to the district. Fine blithely justified his out-of-district candidacy even as Free For All host David Ayres repeatedly questioned him on the matter: “I always tell people, you have an issue with that, take it up with him,” Fine said of Trump. “I mean, he knew that.”




Fine added: “Under state law, actually, under the Constitution, you only have to be a resident of the state. So it is that our founding fathers didn’t think about being a resident of the state was good enough, and so that’s where we are,” he said.

“I think he also knew that the issues that matter to District Six aren’t dissimilar to the issues that matter to Americans. I have yet to speak to one Republican voter who tells me their number one issue isn’t sealing the border and illegal immigration.”

Illegal immigration has not been a subject of discussion in any local government meetings where elected officials have discussed needs from the federal government for at least the past couple of years. The discussions have included Flagler County’s and Flagler Beach’s colossal needs with beach management grants, which were the only concern raised with Waltz in his last visit to the county at the end of August. (See: “Flagler’s Officials Hope Congressman Mike Waltz Will Be Their Sandman as They Dredge for More Beach Dollars.”)

Palm Coast officials have discussed needs with water protection and water-treatment grants, among other priorities. Flagler Beach’s continuing efforts to build a water-treatment and recycling plant to be in compliance with environmental rules are integral to ongoing development strategies. The school district’s exhaustion, with no replacement, of what had been millions in Covid-era federal aid, and on a more granular level, efforts in health and human service agencies to hold on to–or hope to renew–federal grants for mental health and substance abuse services as well as extensions of subsidies lowering the cost of the Affordable Care Act to those at the lower end of the income scale.




Fine touched on those issues only generally. “I’ve spent eight years working on water issues, on infrastructure issues, on development issues, these are issues I think that matter,” he acknowledged. “Whether you’re in Flagler County or Brevard County, the issues that are unique to the county I will get to know, and I commit to get to know every town and every community and every organization over my time in the office, just like I have during my time in the legislature.”

Fine was first elected to the Florida House in 2016, serving until he was term-limited at the end of the last session this year. He won his Florida Senate race handily. His legislative history was marked by leading the legislative battle, on behalf of Gov. Ron DeSantis, against the Reedy Creek Improvement District associated with Disney. Fine’s bill led to the dissolution of the district and others like it. Fine was also a zealous opponent of LGBTQ rights and a zealous advocate for Israel, while often ridiculing, demeaning and insulting Israel’s critics, using a bullying style that he appears to take pride in–and that may have played a role in bringing him to Trump’s attention.

Today–Dec. 16–Fine introduced Senate Bill 100, one of the most censoring bills in recent memory that would also authorize the use of force “to prevent” the “desecration” or removal of an American flag. The bill would forbid the display of “a flag that represents a political viewpoint, including, but not
limited to, a politically partisan, racial, sexual orientation and gender, or political ideology viewpoint.” The American flag, which represents all those categories, would be exempt.

Though the bill does not make that explicit, Fine’s office in a release today said the bill “would ban the use of fictional [sic] country flags like ‘Palestine,’ pro-violence ‘Black Lives Matter’ flags, woke and pro-grooming ideological flags, and the flags of any political candidates in government buildings.” The statement, of course is replete with inaccuracies and bigotry: Palestine is not a “fictional” country. It was declared in existence on Nov. 15, 1988–just as Israel self-declared its existence in 1948–and has been recognized as a sovereign state by 146 nations. Fine’s allusion to the LGBTQ flag as “pro-grooming” is a repeat of an old and vile equivalence of gay individuals with pedophiles, while the equivalence of the Black Lives Matter flag with violence recycles a prejudice that has known different versions since Richard Nixon’s “law and order” euphemisms.




On Friday’s show, Fine described how he got the call from the president-elect, prompting him to make the reference to God. He said he was ready to serve the next four years in the Florida Senate. “I was in fact excited that I wouldn’t be on the ballot in two years because it would be a four year term, and then three weeks ago tomorrow, President Trump asked me to run,” Fine said. “It wasn’t something I expected, wasn’t something that I was asking for. But God saved his life so that he could save the world, and since he says he needs my help to make that happen, then that’s what I’m going to do. And so I’m excited about getting to Washington and help them seal the border, get inflation under control, and stand up for our allies and stand up to our enemies.”

He said he had gotten what he wanted when Trump was elected. “President Trump won, and America has a chance to be saved,” he repeated. He said “they said, well, what do you want?” He didn’t specify who “they” were, but appeared to be describing the call from the president-elect’s entourage (he did not peak of an actual conversation with Trump). “It sounds like you may want me to do something,” he continued, “and we walked through a list of things, and I told them, Look: President Trump has to save America. If you need me to wash bathrooms in the White House in order to make him be successful, then that’s what I will do, and you just let me know. And we talked about a few things, and I gave them what I thought the pros and cons of each were. By the way, when we talked about Congress, I said, Look: you can pick your administration, but you can’t pick your congress. And you probably want a guy who, over eight years, has proven he’s willing to grab the sword and run up the hill.”

That guy would be Randy Fine. “You know,” he continued, “I’m the guy who stopped fake transgender surgeries on children in Florida. I’m the guy who brought school choice to everyone in Florida,” he said. (The school choice bill was primarily credited to Paul Renner, the former speaker of the house who had represented Flagler County.) “I’m the guy who took on Disney when they tried to interfere in our elections. Those were my bills. And so I might want someone like that, but it’s up to you. And then I went home, and three days later, three weeks ago tomorrow, I was taken a nap, and when I woke up from my nap, I reached over to grab my phone. I burned my hand, because it turns out, if you get 1000 text messages in a very short period of time, your phone will overheat, and I had 100 missed calls. And I wondered, first, who died, and then I and then I saw President Trump’s Truth that he called on me to run.”

Trump, with an Updikean twist, had posted on his Truth Social account on Nov. 23: “RUN, RANDY, RUN!”

“And I said, Well, I guess that’s what I’m going to do. And that’s when this started,” Fine said. He also appeared to have no doubt: “I’m going to win.”