Donald Trump’s five-pronged attack plan against Ron DeSantis looks pretty weak
David Freddoso
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This week, former President Donald Trump’s campaigners released his plan to attack his expected main opponent, Ron DeSantis. On the whole, I’d say it’s a mixed bag and that, overall, it’s not very impressive.
Trump’s greatest successes came at the beginning of his modern political career through simple insults hurled at his opponents. Just ask “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Crooked Hillary” if you don’t believe me. But now, he has lost that edge. Everyone got used to it. As our own Conn Carroll once noted, the days when a single Trump insult could disarm an opponent are long gone. (And no, “Ron DeSanctimonious” ain’t gonna cut it.)
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So Trump now has to come up with something more substantive, and these five avenues of attack are supposed to fill that role. Here is my take on each one of them.
Trump will especially hit out against DeSantis for comments he has made on Social Security and Medicare, pointing to the governor’s past support for raising the eligibility age for the welfare programs.
This attack will work with some people, but I still believe it might not be the third rail it once was. Very recently, Sens. Angus King (I-ME), who caucuses with the Democrats, and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) proposed raising the full Social Security retirement age — that is, the age at which maximum benefits become available — from 67 to 70. The measure did not get nearly the negative reaction it might have gotten 20 years ago because we are on already the verge of the program’s insolvency.
If something like this isn’t done now, current law dictates that benefits will decrease by a projected 23% when the program’s trust fund runs out in 2034.
This issue has been losing traction now for two decades, ever since George W. Bush ran in 2000 while advocating private accounts in Social Security. Bush failed, but the message got across to an entire generation of future retirees (basically everyone younger than 50 today) not to count on Social Security as their main source of retirement income. The idea of modest increases to the retirement age for people in that age range is not nearly as scary as it would have been at the turn of the century.
And of course, people are living longer and retiring later than they used to. The change in attitudes is already reflected in the fact that Democrats used to win or break even with senior citizens as recently as 25 years ago, whereas now they get crushed in that demographic, and this is in spite of frequent Republican attempts in the interim to reform Social Security and Medicare.
In short, I doubt that Trump can make much of an issue out of this former “third rail,” especially if the debate takes place in the Republican primary. However, he could cause bigger problems for DeSantis later in the event that the Florida governor beats the odds and wins the nomination.
Trump is also expected to target DeSantis for his position on the war in Ukraine, planning to portray the Florida governor as being unclear on his stance. Trump will specifically use his comments against him, including an interview DeSantis did with Fox News in which the governor declined to take a definite position.
This avenue of attack is more promising, although far from a slam dunk. Aside from the unfortunate fringe movement of outright pro-Putin sentiment on the Right, there exists a much larger minority of perfectly reasonable conservatives who don’t want to spend billions on the war in Ukraine — although I don’t think it’s a defining issue for most of them.
There’s a way for DeSantis to deflect the criticism that he is “unclear” on the issue: simply take a clear stance and don’t be apologetic about it. I’d like to see him say outright that he supports continued help to Ukraine to fight for its own freedom and also that he strongly opposes any direct American involvement in that conflict or any European war.
Ukraine, after all, is not Iraq. Americans are not spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun, or even propping up a state for which people are unwilling to fight. Rather, this is a case of Americans providing mostly hand-me-down weapons and supplies to a nation that has proven perfectly willing to fight for its own survival against an aggressive bully. Not only that, but victory is already at hand. It would be a mistake to reward Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked aggression by cutting Ukraine loose and letting Putin snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
The former president will also focus attacks on DeSantis’s COVID-19 policies as governor…
Trump is known for attacking opponents on their strengths, and this would be a clear case of that. Still, I view this as one of the easiest attacks for DeSantis to rebut. In fact, Trump could come to regret leveling it in the first place.
First, DeSantis can point to Trump’s own early endorsement of various COVID-related measures in the first month or so of the pandemic. No one was upset at the measures taken in the spring of 2020. Then DeSantis can point to the fact that he kept his state and its beaches open and received huge, unjustified blowback for it from uninformed idiot leftists and an extremely hostile, biased national media.
Finally, DeSantis can just point to the scoreboard: How did Floridians feel about my handling of COVID? They just gave me the biggest election victory of any governor in 40 years.
…and his support for former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has long been the target of attacks by Trump.
I haven’t seen a national poll in a very long time showing what Republicans think about Paul Ryan. My guess is that they just don’t. Ryan was last elected to office in 2016, so this one seems like inside baseball to me.
Then again, if anybody needs a rebuttal, it is that Ryan wrote and carried Trump’s highly successful tax reform bill through Congress. Assuming he runs, DeSantis can offer his opponent that back-handed compliment: Yes, I like Paul. He wrote and passed your tax reform bill, which helped make your presidency the success that it was.
How does Trump respond to that?
He will also accuse DeSantis of being disloyal to him, following through with Trump’s previous claims that he is the reason DeSantis was first elected in 2018.
This is the weakest possible argument against a DeSantis nomination. I doubt it will persuade even a single voter who isn’t already determined to vote for Trump no matter what. Even worse, this line of attack will repel some persuadables by bringing out Trump at his whiniest and worst. DeSantis can just reply that he is grateful for the help in 2018, and he returned the favor by working hard for Trump in 2020 and delivering Florida for him — and too bad Trump did so badly in those other states that cost him the presidency.
Look, nobody owes Trump the nomination in 2024 after he blew it in 2020. He has no right to feel so entitled. He has to earn it from the Republican voters, who may not be so interested in electing someone who is, at best, eligible to serve a single one-term-and-done.
This isn’t some gubernatorial primary where everybody is looking for Trump’s endorsement. These guys will be running for president of the United States, not president of the Trump fan club. If Trump wants to beat his expected main opponent, he’s going to have to do more than relive his past glories.