CNN
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday described former President Donald Trump as over-promising and under-delivering, vowing in New Hampshire to “drain the swamp” in Washington as he blamed Trump for failing to deliver his 2016 campaign promises to “sell out.” this
“If I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m not just saying it for an election,” DeSantis said in one of his strongest attacks on the former president yet.
Meanwhile, Trump mocked the size of the crowds at the DeSantis town hall, telling luncheon attendees in Concord that “nobody showed up” to the Florida governor’s event a 40-minute drive to the south to Hollis.
The top two front-runners for the 2024 GOP nomination locked horns in New Hampshire on Tuesday, exchanging gunfire as they criss-crossed the state that hosts the first primary, after the Iowa caucuses, and is a crucial driver.
Their exchanges offered a preview of the coming months, with the Republican field shaping up in recent weeks and the party’s first presidential debate less than two months away.
Trump was tight-lipped about why he was targeting DeSantis, rather than other 2024 GOP rivals such as his former vice president, Mike Pence, or his former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley.
“Somebody said, ‘How come you’re just attacking him?'” Trump told the crowd in Concord. “I said, ‘Because he’s in second place.'”
“‘Well, why don’t you attack other people?'” Trump said, repeating the question he said he was asked. “Because they are not in second place. But soon, I don’t think I’ll be in second place, so I’ll attack somebody else.”
The former president even praised two other GOP contenders, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who he said is “actually a good guy” after Ramaswamy said he would pardon Trump, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who said that “he is a very good man.” a nice guy, indeed.”
Taking advantage of early state polls showing Trump leading the 2024 GOP primaries, Trump focused his attacks on DeSantis over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Florida and his past support for privatizing Social Security and Medicare .
Trump argued that during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, DeSantis wanted “everything shut down” in Florida and made “very threatening speeches, you know, he thinks he’s a tough guy.”
He said DeSantis “loved Fauci,” referring to the government’s former top infectious disease expert, who was a central figure in the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic and who recently stepped down during the administration by President Joe Biden.
Trump’s remarks came shortly after DeSantis fielded a voter’s question about Trump at a Hollis town hall.
One voter told DeSantis that “most of us in this room voted to drain the swamp twice” and asked why he’s the one “who’s done it this time instead of the other option.”
“I remember these rallies in 2016. It was exciting. ‘Find the Swamp’. I also remember ‘Shut her up, shut her up’, right? And then, two weeks after the election, ‘Oh, no, forget it. Forget I ever said that. No no No. One thing you’re going to get from me, if I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m not just saying it for an election,” DeSantis said.
He said he doesn’t make promises he can’t keep, even if they might help him “in a marginal way politically.” DeSantis also said that simply draining the swamp is not effective enough. Instead, he said he wants to “break it.”
It was a riff on one of Trump’s 2016 campaign lines and a suggestion that the former president had failed to follow through on his lofty promises to remake Washington.
“The idea of draining the swamp, in some respects, I think misses it a little bit,” DeSantis said. “We have not emptied it. Today is worse than ever by far. And this is a sad testimony to the state of affairs in our country. But even if you succeed in draining it, the next one may simply fill it up. So I want to break the swamp. That’s really what we have to do.”
Florida’s governor said he would “drop the hammer” on some federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service, and “end the weaponization of government.”
“All of these agencies will be converted in and out,” DeSantis said.
His promise of a more aggressive approach than Trump’s ignores potential legal hurdles he could face if elected next November. In Florida, there are more than a dozen legal battles testing the constitutionality of many of the victories DeSantis has announced on the campaign trail. Critics say DeSantis has built his governorship around enacting laws that appeal to his conservative base, but that, as a Harvard-educated lawyer, he knows are unconstitutional and unlikely to take effect .
The Florida governor’s remarks in New Hampshire came a day after he took aim at another Trump 2016 campaign promise: DeSantis said “not enough” of Trump’s promised border wall had been built between the United States and Mexico.
“For us, it will be a national emergency on day one. This will mobilize every asset available on day one. We have a plan for all the different levers of authority that we have to be able to accomplish this,” DeSantis said Monday on the Rio Grande River on the Mexican border in Maverick County, Texas.
In an effort to position himself to Trump’s political right on immigration enforcement, DeSantis also said he would be “more aggressive on our plan than anything he’s done to empower local officials to enforce the immigration law”.
Trump addressed the issue later Tuesday in his second stop in New Hampshire as he mingled with voters in Manchester at the opening of his campaign headquarters there, saying DeSantis promised to carry out the policies that Trump had already promulgated as president.
“I saw DeSantis yesterday, he stood up and said exactly what he was doing,” Trump said of his border and immigration policies.
