Donald Trump and his allies have already made a habit of going after Ron DeSantis over Social Security and Medicare.
Florida’s governor is ready to start returning fire.
DeSantis is preparing to highlight the former president’s own past support for cutting entitlement programs, according to a source familiar with the governor’s thinking, attempting to redirect one of Trump’s most frequent criticisms back against him.
“Recycling debunked, establishment lies to attack Ron DeSantis says a lot about the strength of his prospective candidacy — and everything about the weakness of Donald Trump’s,” said a person familiar with DeSantis’ political orbit, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about campaign strategy.
Trump’s record includes past support for re-examining the entitlement system and even an increase in government spending that occurred while he was president. Some conservative media outlets have also taken DeSantis’ side in the dispute, defending his record against Trump’s attacks, and the governor himself has weathered criticisms of his record on Social Security and other entitlement programs in previous GOP primaries.
In a statement, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign dismissed any suggestion that Trump’s own record on entitlement programs represented a political vulnerability.
“It appears Ron DeSantis is overcompensating for his disastrous record of throwing seniors under the bus and imposing taxes on families,” said Trump spokesman Steven Cheung. “If his team thinks that’s a winning argument, they should be immediately fired for their outright incompetence and stupidity.”
Both Trump and DeSantis have said that they would not cut Social Security, a Depression-era social insurance program that pays a monthly stipend to retirees.
But the former president himself has voiced some measure of support for re-examining entitlement programs in the recent past. In a 2020 interview with CNBC, he said he would consider entitlement reform “at some point.”
“And at the right time, we will take a look at that,” he said.
Trump’s comments from the CNBC interview were featured briefly in a new ad from a super PAC backing DeSantis, Never Back Down. The ad also accused the former president, citing his attacks on DeSantis’ record on Social Security, of “stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook.”
Trump’s been more specific and far-reaching in his proposals for Social Security in the more distant past. In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump wrote that the solution to the “great Social Security crisis could not be more obvious,” outlining a privatization plan.
“Allow every American to dedicate some portion of their payroll taxes to a personal Social Security account that they could own and invest in stocks and bonds,” he wrote.
Other conservative outlets have also highlighted plans from Trump’s own budget to reduce Medicare and Social Security costs.
DeSantis’ record on Social Security has become the focal point of attacks from Trump and his allies, especially in TV ads. Since the start of April, Trump’s Super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., has run two ads saying the governor wants to take away the benefits for seniors and future generations.
The governor’s decision to fire back could help him move past a politically difficult few weeks, in which Trump appears to have gained momentum in the GOP presidential primary before DeSantis even formally enters the race. DeSantis is widely expected to launch a campaign after the state’s legislative session ends, possibly next month.
The emergence of entitlement programs as a key issue in a GOP primary would seem to be at odds with the Republican Party’s traditional association with reducing government spending. But even conservative older voters, who make up a large portion of the party’s electoral base, are vigorously opposed to cuts and other changes to entitlement programs, polls show.
Attacks over Social Security have been successfully used in a Republican presidential primary before: In 2012, then-candidate Mitt Romney used the criticism to undercut the candidacy of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who compared the program to a “Ponzi scheme.”
DeSantis, in fact, has faced criticism over his Social Security record in a previous Republican primary, when he ran in Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial primary against Adam Putnam. The state’s former commissioner of agriculture cited three of DeSantis’ congressional votes as proof he wanted to cut entitlement programs and raise the Social Security retirement age.
(PolitiFact, assessing Putnam’s ads in 2018, called the accusations “half true,” citing the fact that DeSantis’ votes were for non-binding budget resolutions.)
The ads from Trump’s super PAC have made the same accusation, playing footage of a man eating pudding with his fingers while arguing he’s voted to, among other things, raise the Social Security retirement age to 70.
“Tell Ron DeSantis to keep his pudding fingers off our money,” the ad says.
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