Former President Donald Trump blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) ahead of his presidential campaign launch on Wednesday, asserting he would be doomed to fail in the general election after voting to overhaul entitlement programs when he was a congressman.
Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, took to Truth Social to hit DeSantis’s support of legislation that took aim at Social Security and Medicare during his time in Congress :
Ron DeSanctus can’t win the General Election (or get the Nomination) because he VOTED TO OBLITERATE SOCIAL SECURITY, EVEN WANTING TO RAISE THE MINIMUM AGE TO 70 (or more!), VOTED TO BADLY WOUND MEDICARE, AND FOUGHT HARD AND VOTED FOR A 23% “TAX ON EVERYTHING” SALES TAX.
He wrote that DeSantis “was, and is, a disciple of horrible RINO Paul Ryan, and others too many to mention.” Trump added, “he desperately needs a personality transplant and, to the best of my knowledge, they are not medically available yet.”
MAGA Inc, a Trump-aligned super PAC, has been critical of DeSantis regarding votes on entitlement programs. One ad from the super PAC suggests DeSantis has “pudding fingers,” which are “all over senior entitlement,” and notes he “voted to cut Social Security 3 times.”
As Business Insider noted in February:
As a congressional candidate, DeSantis repeatedly expressed support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed overhaul to entitlement programs by privatizing aspects of Medicare and Social Security, as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck uncovered earlier this week.
Congressman DeSantis went even further than that position. As Josh Barro wrote, DeSantis supported the even more drastic Republican Study Committee’s budget proposal that aimed to balance the federal budget in four years, instead of Ryan’s decade. To achieve such cuts, as the Committee for the Responsible Budget detailed back then, required changing Medicare to a partially private system by 2019 and raising the retirement age to 70. It would have also increased the full retirement age for Social Security to 70 as well.
Another ad dubs the governor “Ron DeSalesTax” and states he “had a plan to…. make you pay more,” to the tune of the nursery rhyme “Old MacDonald.”
In an earlier post on Wednesday, the 45th president touted that DeSantis won Florida’s Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2018 with the help of his endorsement. He noted that subsequent rallies he held in Florida helped DeSantis secure him the governorship:
Look, Rob DeSanctimonious came to me asking for help. He was losing badly, by 31 points, to popular Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. He was getting ready to drop out of the race – Ran a terrible campaign! Ron told me he had one last chance, my Support & Endorsement, which Putnam, and everyone else, wanted also. I gave it to Ron, and the race was over. In one day, he went from losing badly, to winning by a lot. With 3 LARGE TRUMP RALLIES, he WON THE GENERAL ELECTION in an upset. DISLOYAL!!!
While speaking at his first rally of the 2024 campaigning in Waco, Texas, in March, Trump said that when DeSantis approached him for this endorsement, he had “tears in his eyes.”
The posts come as DeSantis is set to launch his presidential bid during a conversation with Twitter CEO Elon Musk on the social media platform at 6:00 p.m. ET, as Breitbart News noted.