NEW YORK (AP) — During his first week on the campaign trail as a presidential candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly bashed his main rival, Donald Trump, from the right.
“This is a different guy from 2015 and 2016,” DeSantis told a conservative radio host before criticizing bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation that Trump championed as “basically a jailbreak law” that would let out of prison for dangerous people.
He also accused Trump of “handing the reins” to Dr. Anthony Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Trump had “passed and tried to deal with” an “amnesty” bill in Congress, and promised that , unlike the former president, he would finish building the border wall between the US and Mexico.
On Saturday in Iowa, he responded to Trump by saying he didn’t like the term “woke” because people have a hard time defining it. “The awakening is an existential threat to our society,” DeSantis said. “To say it’s not a big deal, that just shows you don’t understand what a lot of these issues are right now.”
Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly attacked DeSantis from the left. He suggested that even anti-abortion activists consider Florida’s new six-week abortion ban “too harsh” and argued that DeSantis has made himself nationally unelectable with his congressman votes for cut Social Security and Medicare, even though Trump’s proposal. budgets also repeatedly called for major cuts to entitlements.
The attacks underscore the underlying early dynamics of the race: As DeSantis tries to win over Republican primary voters and erase Trump’s early lead, Trump is already gearing up for a general election showdown against President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Trump has rejected DeSantis’ argument that the Florida governor, not the former president, is the most viable general election candidate.
“Don’t forget, we have to win the election,” Trump stressed during a Fox News Channel town hall Thursday while discussing abortion policy.
To be clear, Trump has also supported other right-wing causes. This week, he revived his promise to end birthright citizenship, saying he would sign an executive order on the first day of his second term to change his interpretation of the 14th Amendment. He also renewed his pledge to use the US military to attack foreign drug cartels and has pushed for the death penalty for drug traffickers.
But DeSantis’ efforts to outdo Trump have raised eyebrows among some observers who question his tactics.
“I don’t think it’s a smart strategy,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican political strategist whose firm has led weekly focus groups with GOP voters where DeSantis’ appeal has faded.
Longwell said he had hoped DeSantis would tailor his argument to the part of the Republican electorate that wants to move on from Trump.
“You can’t beat MAGA Trump,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political movement. DeSantis, he argued, should be working to “consolidate the ‘Move Trump’ supporters to the ‘Maybe Trump’ ones and instead has tried to fight Trump for the ‘Always Trump’ ones.”
DeSantis allies argue the governor has been responding to what they see as Trump’s attacks from the left and highlighting his positions on issues they believe will resonate with Republican primary voters, particularly abortion and war DeSantis PR with Disney.
An official with Never Back Down, a pro-DeSantis super PAC that runs much of his political operation, said DeSantis’ strategy is being informed by what the group’s pollsters have been gathering from voters during the last weeks The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss messaging strategy, said voters have expressed confusion about Trump’s attacks and have responded particularly well to depictions of DeSantis as a fighter who refuses to go back
The group ran a digital ad this week highlighting Trump’s abortion comment that was geo-targeted to areas Trump was visiting in Iowa. He is also exploring messages that will accuse Trump of being too cozy with big corporations during his time in the White House.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung has criticized DeSantis’ insinuations and accused him of ripping off Trump’s ideas.
“Ron DeSantis has tried to steal every element of President Trump’s Agenda47 political platform. He’s a con man and he’s posing as someone who knows what he’s talking about,” he said.
DeSantis, in his early campaign stops, has also tried to paint himself as a disciplined executive who will keep his promises, implying that Trump had not.
“When I tell you I’m going to do something, I don’t just say it because I think that’s what you want to hear, then go into office and forget all the promises I made,” he said in Lexington. South Carolina
Longwell said his research has consistently found that fence voters are willing to put aside concerns about Trump’s temperament because they feel he was so effective in office, and he raised questions about DeSantis’ strategy.
“They don’t like his mouth, they don’t like his tweets, they don’t like his character. But they like what he did as president,” he said.
Trump, for his part, has made it clear that he is looking towards next year’s general election.
In Grimes, Iowa, on Thursday, Trump took a pointed question from a woman who claimed that “we’ve lost people because you supported the jab,” a reference to conspiracies about mRNA vaccines, which ‘has proven that they have saved millions of lives.
While Trump did not reject his suggestion — stressing that he was never in favor of the mandates — he explained that “there’s a huge part of the country that thinks it was a great thing, you understand. There’s no a lot of people in this room, but there are a lot of them.”
During a Fox News town hall later that day, Trump said that “only stupid people” could suggest they had done more than him on abortion as he picked some of the conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned lar Roe v. But he also continued to criticize conservative Republican midterm candidates for not allowing exceptions, even when the mother’s life is at risk, a position in line with most voters.
A recent note to donors from Trump super PAC pollster Tony Fabrizio, first reported by Axios, argued that DeSantis is vulnerable among swing state voters in a general election on issues such as cuts on Social Security and Medicare, book bans in schools, Florida ban. about abortions at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant, and her fight with Disney.
Voters, meanwhile, have mixed views on the escalation of the dispute.
Heidi Lillibridge, a 51-year-old farmer and Republican activist from Vinton, Iowa, worries that Democrats will benefit from criticism of the two leading Republican candidates. She is particularly frustrated by DeSantis’ early attacks.
“Criticizing President Trump’s conservative credentials, when we all know how he performed as president and what he accomplished, I really don’t know why he would do that,” he said.
Darcy Cowart, who saw DeSantis speak outside a bar and restaurant in Bluffton, South Carolina, said that while he had previously supported Trump, he was glad to see a large field with other options.
“He’s not going to change, and he just has that bully mentality. He just won’t give in,” she said. “I know he fights for us, and I know he does some good things, but at the same time, it’s like having this obnoxious relative who always has to be at the dinner table, who is afraid to be there.”
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Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Meg Kinnard in Bluffton, SC, contributed to this report.
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This story has been corrected to show that Trump’s spokesman’s last name is Cheung, not Chueng.
