With Donald Trump now entangled in the gravest and stickiest legal morass of his political life, Ron DeSantis has finally decided to get his licks in. Over the last two weeks, the Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate has accused Trump of cowering from the campaign trail, challenged him to a debate mano a mano, and described him as a duplicitous drag on the GOP’s electoral prospects.
Throughout the entire race, DeSantis has been careful not to appear overly antagonistic toward Trump, lest the conservative base interpret his slights as left-wing, anti-Trump propaganda. But with DeSantis trailing the former president by more than 40 points nationally—and the Iowa caucuses mere months away—his thinking appears to be changing.
On Sunday, DeSantis claimed that Trump has spent the race in hiding—an apparent dig at Trump declining to partake in the first two Republican primary debates. “With all due respect to Donald Trump, we’re not gonna beat the Democrats by adopting Joe Biden’s basement strategy,” DeSantis said on Fox News. “You can’t just be missing in action. You gotta show up, you gotta earn people’s votes. And if you’re not willing to do that, voters will take notice as we get closer to these contests.” In the same interview, DeSantis shot down Trump’s claim that everyone else running in the GOP primary is interviewing to be his vice presidential pick. “No, I’m running for president,” DeSantis said. “We need somebody that can serve two terms. We need somebody that can win states like Georgia and Arizona, which President Trump cannot do, or did not do, even though candidates like [John] McCain and [Mitt] Romney had no problem winning those states.”
DeSantis used that same line last week during a campaign speech in California. “I understand that one of my residents was here earlier, saying that he turned Florida red,” DeSantis said of Trump on Friday. “I just wish if he was the one that turned Florida red, that he wouldn’t have turned Georgia and Arizona blue.”
Still, despite ramping up his anti-Trump rhetoric in recent days, the Florida governor is generally playing it safe: On Fox News, he was sure to frame his criticism relatively respectfully. And in California, he failed even to mention Trump by name.
DeSantis’s campaign, however, has been a little more blunt. The official DeSantis 2024 website now lists among its merchandise a “Trump veto pen” for $7.8 trillion, under an image that says “Item not found,” a reference to the added national debt that accrued during Trump’s White House tenure. Meanwhile, earlier this week, the DeSantis rapid response team accused Trump of admitting that he “never intended to keep his promise to get Mexico to pay for the wall.”
“What other promises is he making that he knows he can’t keep?” the DeSantis campaign affiliate wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
DeSantis echoed this sentiment from his personal X account, writing on Tuesday that Trump’s promise to have Mexico pay for a border wall “was just an empty campaign slogan.” He added, “As President, I will get this done. No more bluster! Results are all that matter!”
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And yet, DeSantis and his campaign have opted not to hit Trump where he appears most vulnerable: The two federal and two state-level indictments he is currently battling. (DeSantis has in fact continued to defend Trump and his allies’ false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, which lie at the heart of Trump’s indictment in Georgia and one of his federal indictments.)
Instead, the governor’s campaign has instead sought to portray Trump as somehow different from the candidate who defeated Hillary Clinton seven years ago. “[Trump is] taking positions that I think are different from what he took in 2015 when he first came onto the scene, and I do think he’s a different candidate today than he was back then,” DeSantis told ABC News last month. In a Radio Iowa interview two days prior, DeSantis accused Trump of “changing in a way that is not consistent with the values of the people in Iowa.” These changes, in DeSantis’s telling, include Trump’s strategic retreat away from antiabortion hard lines. “I think all pro-lifers should know that he’s preparing to sell you out,” he stated.
Caleb Ecarma
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