Forget Ukraine. Retirement programs are the real killer.
Trump’s line of attack is going to create three compounding problems for DeSantis. First, it is going to drive a wedge between him and the electorate. While conservative-movement elites would desperately like to cut, privatize, or do away with the New Deal and its legacy programs, their voters have never shared those desires. Eighty-four percent of Republicanscutting Medicare or Social Security.
Second, even if DeSantis survives these attacks, Trump’s commitment to airing them in the primary will damage DeSantis’s standing in the general election. Indeed, Trump is all but openly handing material to Democrats to use against DeSantis. “You know, when they have policy in their head, they never change,” he said. “They may say they change, but they always go back to it.
Third, by damaging DeSantis’s electability, Trump is undercutting the main rationale for DeSantis’s nomination. By and large, Republicans like Trump. Even most Republicans who have some misgivings about his character, and perhaps fretted over the insurrection at the end of his time in office, consider him to have been a good president. They want to move on because Trump lost and DeSantis is a winner.
And while DeSantis is probably still a stronger general-election candidate than Trump, his toxic baggage on retirement programs reduces that advantage significantly and may eliminate it altogether. If Joe Biden runs against DeSantis, his campaign will just hammer him relentlessly on this topic. Republican elites coalesced around DeSantis more than a year ago. At the time, DeSantis’s record on Social Security and Medicare was hiding in plain sight but attracted barely any attention. They picked their non-Trump horse before fully vetting him. He may very well beat Trump and Biden. But even now, conservatives seem not to have absorbed the full implications of the liabilities they are taking on.
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