Former President Donald Trump’s sharpest nickname for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is neither “DeSanctimonious” nor “Meatball Ron.” Trump is running against someone named “Ryan DeSantis.”
That would be former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), whom he is trying to make DeSantis’s running mate. Trump would also like to remind you who actually did make Ryan his running mate: Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), the defeated 2012 GOP presidential nominee and Never Trumper.
Trump is blasting DeSantis as a member of the “Paul Ryan establishment” and highlighting his time in Congress supporting Ryan budgets that contained various entitlement reforms.
“You remember … Democrats used that ‘wheelchair over the cliff commercial?” Trump asked an audience in Iowa during his first trip of the cycle to the early state. “Very effective. That was about [Ryan].”
It’s a long way away from when Newt Gingrich, himself a former Republican House speaker who got in trouble for trying to curb entitlement spending, criticized Ryan’s Medicare reforms as “right-wing social engineering” and heard from an angry Iowa voter. Then Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) echoed complaints that Gingrich was “undercutting” Ryan.
“What he did to Paul Ryan is a perfect example of irrational behavior that you do not want in the commander in chief,” Sununu said in late 2011.
Now Trump is making Ryan central to his case against DeSantis, the only Republican at all competitive with — and sometimes ahead of — the former president in the polls.
DeSantis, Trump said Monday night, is a “disciple” of Ryan’s who wanted to “decimate” entitlement programs that benefit senior citizens.
It’s a rare area of agreement with President Joe Biden, who has highlighted Social Security and Medicare cuts as top Republican vulnerabilities and has himself pledge to avoid trimming even one penny from these programs.
Biden has been reluctant to accept Trump’s help in keeping Republicans off this course during the debt ceiling standoff, primarily because the current president wants to continue using it as a campaign issue in the event of a rematch in 2024. He also wants to brand entitlement cutters as “MAGA.”
The Biden White House has contended Trump did not keep his 2016 campaign promises to eschew entitlement cuts during his first term. Trump also worked closely with Ryan on tax cuts, which became law, and Obamacare repeal, which largely did not but did but the House.
Since then, Trump has tried to return to populist form. He has also split with his erstwhile allies in the Republican establishment, both Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell pushed back against Trump’s conduct in and around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, while Ryan has suggested Trump will not be the 2024 Republican nominee.
Trump is using Ryan to ensure that it will not be DeSantis. Whether this strategy will work remains to be seen, though the former speaker’s standing with the conservative base is diminished.
The same night Trump bludgeoned DeSantis as a Ryan-aligned establishment stooge, the Florida governor told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he disagreed with Biden about the war in Ukraine.
“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said in a statement read aloud on the air by Carlson.
DeSantis thus aligned himself with Trump, and against his supposed allies in the Republican establishment, on one of the most populist platforms on cable television.
There is also a risk that Trump’s penchant for name-calling and internecine Republican warfare will remind GOP voters and donors of why they are open to abandoning the former president for DeSantis in the first place.
Nevertheless, Trump barreled through 16 other Republican presidential candidates in 2016 because he was willing to go negative early and often. He then beat Hillary Clinton by winning blue-collar voters in industrial battleground states, partially on a message of avoiding cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Trump clearly believes a similar playbook can work again. He faced only token opposition in the 2020 Republican primaries, when he was seeking reelection as an incumbent.
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The former president hopes DeSantis’s dalliances with the Ryan road map will be his own path to renomination.
