Trump’s Attacks On The DeSantis Record In Florida Blow Up the Right’s Narrative on Crime, Covid, and the Economy

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Attacks from former president and GOP 2024 frontrunner, Donald Trump, on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), as expected, have been anything but conventional. While Trump’s bombastic rhetoric is no longer surprising to anyone who has watched him blow past the norms of American politics, some attacks have raised eyebrows – particularly as Trump has denigrated Florida, which many on the right hold up as the model of Republican success.

In recent months, Trump has slammed DeSantis for everything from his fight with Disney to being disloyal for running against him to even suggesting he groomed teenage girls – all in an apparent attempt to keep him out of the 2024 GOP primary. The effort failed, as DeSantis is expected to jump into the race officially on Wednesday night in a Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk, who in the past has signaled his support for Florida’s governor.

DeSantis, who was reelected by a whopping 19 points in November, ran in 2022 by touting the so-called “free state” of Florida, boasting of lax Covid policies, safe cities, and low cost of living. The right-of-center media jumped on this narrative as well during the 2022 midterm elections and blasted Democrat-led cities as dangerously crime-ridden and horrendously unaffordable due to inflation and housing costs, which were blamed on strict Covid policies, like enduring lockdowns.

While that narrative from the right did not result in the red wave many pundits and observers expected, it did certainly seep into the political discourse and continues to define our politics today. Most partisan actors have stayed within their camps in either defending current policies when it comes to crime and the economy, with one exception: Trump has noticeably broken ranks and attacked DeSantis’s record on both issues.

In April, Trump’s PAC sent out a mailer titled “The Real Ron DeSantis Playbook” and tore the Florida governor apart issue by issue. The data-heavy attack began by declaring, “While Ron DeSantis engages in a weeks-long shadow campaign for president boasting his playbook, Florida continues to tumble into complete and total delinquency and destruction.”

“On DeSantis’ watch, Florida has become one of the least affordable states to live in the country,” the mailer continued, adding:

In his first term as Florida governor, Ron DeSantis raised taxes on Floridians by more than $1.5 billion.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that a Floridian making $10 an hour must work 86 hours per week just to afford rent on a modest single bedroom home in Florida.

The cost of living in south Florida shot up 10% in just the last year alone, the highest increase by far in years, while the national average was only 6.5%.

Home prices skyrocketed in Miami by 32% last year, and by 34% in Tampa.

Trump’s lengthy takedown of his own homestate — which is also governed by a GOP-led state House and Senate — and its leader went on to cover other topics like the state’s high gas prices (top 10 most expensive) and lackluster education system – “On Education, Florida ranked #39 in Health and Safety, #50 in Affordability, and #30 in Education and Childcare.”

Trump’s attack then segued into crime. “In WalletHub’s October 2022 rankings of safest states to live, Florida came in at the bottom, ranking 44th out of 50. According to the study, Florida ranked 44th in workplace safety, 46th in roadway safety, and 25th in financial safety, and 34th in personal safety,” the mailer concluded.

The attack also hit DeSantis for Florida’s dismal rankings on issues like teacher pay, healthcare costs, and the cost of raising children.

Trump has also torn into both DeSantis and Florida repeatedly on his Truth Social platform. Trump posted that under DeSantis Florida was the “Third Worst in the Nation for COVID-19 Deaths (losing 86,294 People), Third Worst for Total Number of Cases, at 7,516,906. Other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron.” Trump even claimed Florida “did worse than New York” in terms of the Covid death rate, taking a hammer to DeSantis’s long-hyped success in keeping Florida “free” and safe during the pandemic.

Other attacks include Trump declaring in March that “In Education, Florida ranks among the worst in the Country and on crime statistics, Florida ranked Third Worst in Murder, Third Worst in Rape, and Third Worst in Aggravated Assault. For 2022, Jacksonville was ranked as one of the Top 25 Major Crime Cities in the Country, with Tampa and Orlando not doing much better.”

Media outlets from the LA Times to the Washington Examiner have picked up on Trump’s attacks, the Examiner fact-checked his numbers to try and preserve the right’s narrative, while the LA Times lauded Trump “for telling the truth.”

Trump blasting Florida as one of the worst areas in the country for crime flies in the face of the right’s narrative that Democrat-led cities and states are suffering out-of-control crime as a result of left-wing policies. The Washington Post’s number-crunching columnist Philip Bump tracked the rise of this narrative as it was mentioned across CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News ahead of the midterms. Bump wrote that “Through July and August, all three networks were mentioning crime about as much as they did in the first half of the year. In late September, though, mentions on Fox News began to soar.”

“In the middle of October, mentions began to rise on CNN and MSNBC, too, in part as a reflection of the increased discussion of crime on the campaign trail,” Bump noted, adding that, of course, crime in the country is up since the pandemic as well. Any regular viewer of Fox News or reader of publications like the New York Post or the Daily Mail is keenly aware that an editorial focus on crime tied to Democrat-run big cities remains a major focus of coverage.

Trump’s attacks on DeSantis rebut one of the key talking points the GOP and right used during the last election cycle: that Democrats create crime and Republicans do not. The same can be said for cost of living as Biden and the Democrats were hammered by both the media and the GOP over inflation, which has been undeniably hurting everyday Americans in a myriad of ways. However, Trump is inadvertently bursting that narrative as well – certainly doing a better job pushing back on it than Biden has ever done. Trump running against DeSantis’s record in Florida will certainly require either a lot of cognitive dissonance on the right or will force the GOP to alter its attacks on Biden and the Democrats.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.