Less than a week out from the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination are starting to find their voices in criticizing him.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) told supportive Iowa talk show host Steve Deace that Trump has lost a step or two compared to when he won the presidency.
“If you put a side by side between him in 2016 riffing and really at the top of his game versus now in 2024, I mean, it’s just a different guy that you’re seeing there,” DeSantis said.
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley implied the country can’t survive Trump’s game if he’s the same guy we’ve been seeing since 2015.
“We can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos,” Haley said in Iowa. “We won’t survive it.”
“We have a country to save, and that means no more drama,” she continued, “no more taking things personally.”
DeSantis surrogates Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) have hit Trump for failing to fulfill his 2016 campaign promises, contending that the Florida governor will be different.
“President Trump signed an omnibus that didn’t have the money for a full [border] wall in there and said, ‘I’ll never do this again,’” Massie said in Iowa as DeSantis looked on. “And then he did it again. And he did it again. … You can find a dozen times when he signed a [continuing resolution] or an omnibus and complained that it didn’t have the wall in it.”
“He could have vetoed it,” Massie added. “The Democrats in the Senate didn’t have the votes to override a veto. So he could have vetoed these things.”
Haley has also accused Trump of “lying” about her record, especially on immigration.
“I appreciate all the attention President Trump is giving me. It’s quite sweet and thoughtful of him, but he’s lying about it,” Haley said on a Fox News town hall.
“Just because President Trump says something doesn’t make it true,” she said.
Some of these attacks aren’t entirely new. Haley has been talking about the “chaos” that follows Trump since at least October. DeSantis has made the idea that he will be a more competent and consistent version of Trump central to his campaign.
There is also no guarantee these attack lines will work. If DeSantis hasn’t convinced Republican primary voters that he is more disciplined than Trump by now, can he in the final days before Iowans caucus? Meanwhile, Trump has been panned as a “chaos candidate” by intraparty foes for years, dating all the way back to Jeb Bush.
Precious little good it has done Bush and other Republicans who have tried it before Haley.
But the criticism of Trump is coming a little easier and with less apology from his GOP foes, especially DeSantis and Haley.
“It’s a different Donald Trump than in ’15 and ’16,” DeSantis argued late last year. “You know, back then, he was colorful, but it was really ‘America First,’ about the policies. Now, a lot of it’s about him.”
Trump, for his part, has shifted some of his fire away from DeSantis and toward Haley as the latter has surged in New Hampshire.
For the other Republicans in the race, it’s now or never. Nobody who is serious about winning the nomination will go full Never Trump, like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Former Vice President Mike Pence is already out of the running after breaking sharply with his erstwhile boss.
But if you are trying to beat Trump, at some point, you must at least differentiate yourself and your candidacy from him.
The latest Morning Consult poll in Iowa showed Trump at 58%, Haley at 15%, DeSantis at 14%, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 10%.
Trump is up 32.7 points in the Hawkeye State, per the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.
If you are one of the other Republican candidates, you need something major to change in the trajectory of that race in a short amount of time after months of relative stability.
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Maybe that means finding holes in Trump’s record or his stamina compared to 2016 or his ability to avoid chaos and division.
Whatever it takes, GOP contenders are down to a matter of weeks in their quest to take Trump down in 2024. It remains to be seen whether their most recent forays are too little too late.
