Assuming he runs, DeSantis would love for the nomination fight to be fought on the ground of who pushed lockdowns harder in 2020.
Donald Trump just fired the first salvo of the 2024 Republican primary against the man expected to be his top rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. In a blistering statement, he went after DeSantis on a number of fronts — returning to the moniker “Ron DeSanctimonious” and portraying him as desperately headed for defeat in 2018 before Trump backed him. But one part of his argument — his criticism of DeSantis’s handling of Covid — is likely to backfire spectacularly.
Trump said DeSantis was an “average Republican governor with great public relations, who didn’t have to close up his state, but did, unlike other Republican governors.”
This is a complete distortion of reality. As president, Trump issued guidance that states should lock down to “slow the spread.” As with every other governor, DeSantis initially followed those recommendations, before realizing relatively early that the severe lockdowns and school closures did not change the trajectory of the pandemic sufficiently to justify the severe disruption they caused to families, businesses, and children.
While it’s true that DeSantis was not the first governor to begin reopening, it’s also true that when Georgia governor Brian Kemp started reopening in April 2020, Trump criticized him at a White House press conference — flanked by none other than Anthony Fauci — for acting too soon.
“I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities,” Trump told the White House press corps.
And as Politico recounted at the time:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert, echoed Trump’s disapproval.
“If I were advising the governor, I would tell him that he should be careful,” Fauci said at Wednesday’s briefing, acknowledging a “natural” desire “to move ahead quickly.”
Any attack on DeSantis’s record on Covid would just draw attention to Trump’s much worse record on Covid lockdowns.
In a press release from his own 2020 campaign, Trump highlighted this recollection of Fauci:
Dr. Fauci: “The first and only time that Dr. Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president, to actually have a, quote, shutdown in the sense of, not really shutdown, but to really have strong mitigation …. the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation. The next, second time that I went with Dr. Birx into the president and said 15 days are not enough, we need to go 30 days, obviously there were people who had a problem with that because of the potential secondary effects. Nonetheless, at that time, the president went with the health recommendations, and we extended it another 30 days… I can just tell you the first and only time that I went in and said we should do mitigation strongly, the response was yes, we’ll do it.”
Assuming he runs, DeSantis would love for the campaign to be fought on the ground of who pushed lockdowns harder in 2020. This is quite an own goal from Trump.