Can Trump run on the DeSantiss Left in 2024?

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Ron DeSantis at a joint event with Donald Trump in 2018. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

As he awaits word on his challengers for the 2024 Republican presidential nominating contest, Donald Trump is weighing his options for taking down intraparty opponents for the first time since 2016. And without a doubt, the opponent he fears most is the governor of his own state. , Ron DeSantis. Yes, Trump can and will continue to treat DeSantis as a no-nonsense loser until the 45th president comes to his senses and endorses the then-obscure congressman in his uphill 2018 primary against the favored incumbent. gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam. But that description doesn’t matter to Republicans whose most vivid memories of the Florida governor are his cultural war forays (including his outrageous attack on the woke Mickey Mouse) and his wildly successful that performance in the 2022 midterm-elections that ended the evolution of the once-purple Sunshine State into an East Coast South Dakota type.

But there’s another, sharper way for Trump to make Republicans uneasy about DeSantiss’ presence before MAGA: following the political stances he took before Trump allegedly made his career out of mediocrity and defeat . And according to Rolling Stones Asawin Suebsoeng and Tim Dickinson, Trump is considering an attack on DeSantis from what would normally be described as the left.

In other words, instead of vilifying his governor as a cut-throat RINO the way he described most Republican rivals, Trump will go after DeSantis for supporting budget austerity, entitlement reform, and free trade (all of positions common to hard-core pre-MAGA conservatives):

In 2013, DeSantis’ first year in office, he voted for a far-right budget resolution that aimed to balance the federal budget in just four years twice as fast as a competing proposal by [Paul] Ryan who got the Republican budget was embarrassed like a starving grandma.

Thedraconian cuts voted for by DeSantis would raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 70. It would weaken Medicare by offering premium support to seniors instead of comprehensive health coverage. And it would have gutted Social Security by giving recipients a miserly annual adjustment for inflation. Taken together, the two measures would cut these programs for seniors by more than $250 billion over a decade.

Trump famously abandoned austerity politics when he took office in 2017, presiding over an orgy of tax cuts and unbridled spending. And while his failed attack on Obamacare has included a series of efforts to gut the Medicaid program that provides health care for low-income Americans, he is distancing himself from the GOP’s traditional hunger to engage talk of Social Security and Medicare, welfare programs middle-class voters. and perhaps especially retired Republicans and near-retirees who considered the benefits they received.

Throwing off the green eyeshade of austerity is one of several voter-pleasing steps Trump has taken to detoxify conservative politics. Others have abandoned the free-trade shibboleths so unpopular with the GOPs white working-class base and are ignoring a reflexive defense-hawk tendency that has predictably led to unpopular forever wars. On all of these issues, the Rolling Stone report suggests, Trump will try to portray DeSantis as an Establishment figure who will bring back the bad old days:

[O]n Russia, in particular, DeSantis sounds like a throwback, McCain-style hawk, blasting Putin as an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy nuclear weapons. And when it comes to other aspects of his international and domestic platform, the former president is using a familiar playbook, and it appears to be sticking. In a throwback to 2016, he described DeSantis in several private conversations in recent weeks as: Bad for trade.

One of the ironies of Trump’s proposed attack on DeSantiss’ pre-MAGA posture is that in every meaningful respect he was in those days in complete lockdown with his colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus, who later considered Trumps ultra-MAGA shock troops in Congress. Back then, HFC was more of a vanguard for the tea-party movement in its ferocious advocacy of strident attacks on the legacy of the New DealGreat Society. Perhaps more to the point, as demonstrated by the fight against Kevin McCarthys Speakership bid, HFC members are once again urging budget austerity now that a Democratic administration they say is spending America out of debt. In fact, most are flirting with making entitlement reform a condition for accepting the debt ceiling measures necessary to avert economic disaster. Trump couldn’t have followed DeSantiss like-mindedly in 2013 without throwing away some of his most loyal followers today.

But risks aside, the question remains whether GOP primary voters can be convinced to consider the Ron DeSantis of yesteryear (if not the real Ron DeSantis) as the quintessential Ron DeSantis, as opposed to the gruff anti-woke crusader he seems to be. he is now, whose appeal to Trump’s conservative Evangelical fans is becoming an existential threat to the return of the 45th president. Could the governor fighting to make the Hillsdale of the South a progressive state college is a jaded Establishment Republican who wants to cut the Social Security checks of church-going Republican retirees? It won’t be an easy sell. But one thing we know for sure: If Trump decides on this as his strategy, he won’t pull any punches in pursuing it. The guy who in 2016 dared to imply that John McCain was a loser for enduring years of torture as a POW wouldn’t show Ron DeSantis any grudging respect when he started hitting him on the hip and thigh.

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