Former President Donald Trump and his allies have already begun drawing up possible plans of attack against likely 2024 challenger and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to three people familiar with the matter.
“Here … Trump is kicking him in the nuts,” says a person close to the former president.
The former president’s determination to obliterate his ascendant rival underscores how unwilling Trump is to pass the torch and relinquish his stewardship of the Republican Party — even if doing so is fracturing the party. As Trump and his ideological successor DeSantis battle for control of the Republican Party, the winner of this power struggle will help determine the exact kind of ultimate politics that modern conservatives see as their future: Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality or a more disciplined MAGAism of Desantis.
With everyone on the Trump team expecting DeSantis to challenge the former president in the upcoming GOP presidential primary, Trump and his advisers are planning another scorched-earth campaign against DeSantis as soon as he announces his 2024 bid.
Over the past two months, Trump has been talking with political allies about effective ways to hit DeSantis on both personal issues — recurring concerns about his “likability” and alleged charisma deficit — and political issues such as DeSantis’ hawkish foreign policy, trade positions, posture of COVID-19, proximity to the party’s “establishment” and past votes to cut the social safety net, sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Trump has so far engaged in several discussions on the topic, but campaign advisers are trying to keep the finer details of his opposition jab under wraps for now. Still, that hasn’t stopped Trump’s enthusiasm for going after DeSantis — his former friendly MAGA ally — whom the former president now sees as his biggest intra-party nemesis. In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly questioned some of those close to him: “What else do we have [Ron]?” he asked, according to two sources who heard his inquiry.
Editor’s Pick
On multiple issues, Trump and his subordinates have sought to portray DeSantis as an “establishment” figure — one favored by supposedly dark party bigwigs like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. One of Trump’s biggest impacts on the GOP has been to largely roll back former Speaker Ryan’s budget-cutting austerity measures and usher in an era of free-spending, debt-increasing spending that has combined tax cuts for the wealthy with a rhetorical cease-fire against threats for the Bennies of the masses – ranging from Social Security to Medicare.
One area where Trump and his allies smell this kind of weakness in DeSantis is Social Security (although President Trump himself has shown openness to possible significant cuts to popular welfare programs).
“In the Republican primary, only Donald Trump can effectively go after Ron DeSantis for wanting to cut Social Security,” a Republican close to Trump’s 2024 campaign told Rolling Stone. “Trump has a track record of saying the right things on this issue, both when it comes to general elections and to Republican primary voters. DeSantis’ record in the House [on this topic] is very much from Paul Ryan’s platform, privatize Social Security, which is just not where our voters are right now.”
For Trump, DeSantis could easily be painted as a heartless budget cutter. During his time in the House from 2013 to 2018, DeSantis was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus — the most hard-line of the GOP conference members. “He was part of the team,” Freedom Caucus founder and former Arizona representative Matt Salmon tells Rolling Stone. Salmon also praised DeSantis as “one of the most principled people I’ve ever had the chance to work with.”
In the run-up to the rise of Trumpism in 2015 and 2016, these principles were about curbing government spending by repealing Obamacare and pursuing “entitlement reform.” In 2013, during DeSantis’ first year in office, he voted for a far-right budget resolution that sought to balance the federal budget in just four years — twice as fast as a rival Ryan measure that would have pushed the Republican budget to be derided as a “starving granny with zombie eyes”.
Connected
The draconian cuts DeSantis voted for would have raised the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 70. It would have weakened Medicare by offering seniors “premium support” instead of comprehensive health coverage. And it would erode Social Security by giving recipients paltry annual inflation adjustments. Combined, the two measures would cut these essential safety programs for seniors by more than $250 billion over a decade.
Additionally, two people who have spoken to Trump in the past few months about how DeSantis is the “establishment” candidate — a claim Trump likes to make even though Trump is literally the leader and standard-bearer of his own party — said the former president has pointed to foreign policy as a means of distinguishing himself from the Florida Republican. During at least one dinner late last year, the former president told a longtime aide that DeSantis was comfortable with “endless wars,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the exchange.
On foreign policy, Trump represented a partial break with the interventionist neoconservative foreign policy that had defined the Republican Party since the George W. Bush era. Trump has blasted Republican hawks like John McCain, pushed NATO allies to cough up more money for their own defense, toyed with Vladimir Putin, regularly criticized US engagements in Afghanistan and Syria (even as he was about to escalate military involvement abroad) and forged an open relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
DeSantis has a far more conventional Republican profile. It begins with his decorated military service—during the Global War on Terror, he served as a JAG officer at Guantanamo Bay and was deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, as the chief legal advisor to SEAL Team One.
MAGA politicians are often apologists for Russia, seeing Putin as the epitome of the authoritarian Christian nationalism they would prefer to impose on the United States. But on Russia, in particular, DeSantis sounds like a throwback, McCain-esque hawk, blasting Putin as “an authoritarian gas station attendant … with some legacy nukes.”
And when it comes to other aspects of his international and domestic platform, the former president is using a familiar playbook and seems to be sticking to it. Going back to 2016, he described DeSantis in several private conversations in recent weeks as: “Bad for business.”
True to his warmongering policy, Trump has made trade wars the centerpiece of his administration. In a show of executive power, Trump imposed tariffs on everything from solar panels to washing machines to steel — insulting geopolitical foes (China), foes (India) and allies (Canada) in equal measure. For Trump, raising taxes on cheap imports has become a politically powerful — if economically incoherent — display of economic nationalism.
Quiet, DeSantis is much more massive in the trade. While accepting rhetorical vacillations regarding “communist” China, DeSantis has catered to the U.S.’s top trading partners as governor of Florida, recently hosting a trade conference with Japan in Orlando.
In recent talks with longtime confidants, Trump has signaled his intention to beat DeSantis over the former congressman’s role in promoting a trans-Pacific free trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In a 2015 vote, DeSantis voted to give President Obama “fast track” authority to strike that trade deal with dozens of Asian countries. He joined an unusual bipartisan coalition with some far-left Democrats — including former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who represents Portland, Oregon. In Trump’s words, that makes DeSantis somehow “pro-Obama” on trade policy.
Whatever the political merits of the trade deal, it was bad policy amid rising economic nationalism. Public opinion has turned so sharply against the TPP that even Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton opposed it in her 2016 presidential bid, and Trump upped the ante on US involvement a bit in his first full day in office by speaking out against her as “a bad, bad deal for American business, for workers, for taxpayers.”
But in perhaps his most brazen attempt to brand himself as more Trump than Trump, DeSantis has been trying for months to fully align himself with the GOP’s anti-vaccine factions. It’s a move that Trump — as he told at least one Republican strategist late last year — sees as completely “bogus,” given how DeSantis tried to have it both ways on the coronavirus shoot. Several people currently working to get Trump re-elected tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his campaign fully intend to troll this hypocrisy in the primary.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis’ approach to controlling the spread of the deadly disease wasn’t much different than governors in blue states, including a move to quarantine visitors from states like Louisiana. And in 2020, he praised then-President Trump for the administration’s determination to cut red tape to speed vaccine development. In May 2021, DeSantis encouraged citizens to get shots, telling the public, “Vaccines protect you. Get vaccinated and then live your life.”
But since then, DeSantis has refused to cater to the hyper-partisan vaccine rejectionism espoused by many in the MAGA base and in conservative influence communities. Until January 2022, he refused…
Add Comment