Trump building extensive opposition file on Florida governor ahead of 2024
Rachel Schilke
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Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his game against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who he views as his No. 1 rival in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, by creating a substantial portfolio of attacks focused on the up-and-coming governor’s previous employment and policy stances.
Since launching his campaign in November shortly after the midterm elections, Trump has zeroed in on DeSantis as his primary challenger. With DeSantis’s overwhelming reelection victory, he was already viewed as Trump’s biggest threat and a rising star within the Republican Party.
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DeSantis has not announced his candidacy for president, but that is not stopping Trump’s team and his allied PAC from conducting extensive research into DeSantis’s record to build a strong opposition case in the event that the two go head-to-head.
A Trump-allied group has drilled into the governor’s work as assistant U.S. attorney before running for Congress. The group accused DeSantis of being an “extremely lenient prosecutor” in cases involving child pornography, among other things, according to Politico.
“The team itself has felt like he has had a free ride without scrutiny for a number of years. Just because he’s aggressive and willing to fight doesn’t make him MAGA. MAGA is the policies and there is a tremendous amount of sunlight between Trump policies and DeSantis policies,” Bryan Lanza, who was a part of the former president’s 2016 campaign, told the outlet.
“The more and more that gets highlighted the more DeSantis is going to get exposed as just another member of the establishment and compared to Jeb Bush,” Lanza said.
Trump already has started comparing DeSantis to former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) and former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), two Republicans that the former president refers to as “RINO,” short for Republican in name only.
In Iowa, Trump ramped up his attempts to link DeSantis to centrist GOP members, calling him “Ryan DeSantis,” adding another nickname to his existing favorites of Ron “DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron.”
However, the attempts of Trump’s team to link DeSantis to soft-on-prosecution claims could prove to be high-risk with a chance of backfiring. Allies close to the governor say he pursued “the strongest sentences he could” and to say he was lenient is inaccurate.
“To make any allegation that he was soft on any kind of case, especially child pornography, is just ludicrous. It defies the logic of what I saw in the office or what my office would let happen,” retired Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Henry, who was a supervisor of DeSantis, said. “He wasn’t a lone wolf on his own making deals without the entire weight of the U.S. Attorney’s office overseeing what he was doing.”
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Trump’s team is in overdrive, working to prevent deep-pocket donors and established GOP lawmakers hoping to move away from Trump in 2024 from joining together to support DeSantis. He has criticized DeSantis’s voting record in Congress, particularly in policy areas such as military involvement overseas and entitlement cuts.
DeSantis, who would suffer a disadvantage for his lack of direct foreign policy involvement, has begun ramping up his meetings with foreign leaders and voicing his opinion on the war in Ukraine.
The former president has also blasted DeSantis for backtracking his views on changing the retirement age and privatizing Medicare and Social Security, a hot-button topic that escalated after President Joe Biden claimed Republicans were aiming to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of their spending bill negotiations. The former president pitched himself as the only one who could protect seniors and their benefits.
Some former Trump allies who are switching to support DeSantis find that while Trump may have some strong Republican policy views, his personality could cost him votes.
“Trump was a good policy guy and I’d put him up there with Ronald Reagan on policy, but presidentially he was a disaster the way he acted, the calling people names. He’s just not a nice person. … If he thinks he had trouble getting elected before, there are more and more people out there across the country who said I was for him the first time, the second time, but what’s going on and his problems I don’t think I can support him,” former Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA), who co-chaired Trump’s 2015 Pennsylvania campaign in Pennsylvania, said.
Marino added that he doesn’t think DeSantis needs to promote himself to become a front-runner in the 2024 presidential race, should he choose to enter.
“He’s a leader. He doesn’t call people names. He doesn’t make fun of women. That’s an easy one. I truly meant Trump was a genius on policy and he really blew it. I told him about it. He knows it all,” Marino said.
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DeSantis is hitting the road to raise his national profile. In recent weeks, the Florida governor has made stops in Iowa as part of his book tour for The Courage to be Free and visited Nevada on Sunday.
If the governor decides to run in 2024, it is likely he will not make a presidential announcement until the Florida legislative session ends in May. He is expected to come out of the session with a handful of key legislative wins that could provide him with a major boost in the primaries.