The New York Times previewed on Thursday a line of attack that Governor Ron DeSantis, when he jumps into the race in earnest, is expected to employ against Donald Trump. DeSantis will reportedly retail the high-risk, high-reward notion that Trump is a slave to fashion, and that this led him to embrace soft-on-crime policies.
Mr. DeSantis and his backers see the signature criminal-justice law enacted by Mr. Trump in 2018 as an area of weakness with his base, and Mr. DeSantis has indicated that he would highlight it when the two men tussle for the Republican nomination, according to three people with knowledge of Mr. DeSantis’s thinking. That law, known as the First Step Act, reduced the sentences for thousands of prisoners.
The Times observes that executing this tactical assault on Trump’s position will be complicated by the fact that then-congressman DeSantis had also supported an early version of the First Step Act in the House, though he didn’t vote for the bill’s final passage. This will only be a “complicating factor,” however, if DeSantis decides to be consistent — an encumbrance that does not bind his opponent.
If he adopts this approach, DeSantis will reprise Donald Trump’s 2016 primary strategy. Then, the future president leveraged the Republican base’s hostility toward the dovish immigration policies that Republican lawmakers had believed were necessary and popular when they pursued them.
In 2013, when the consensus on the right was that a hard-line position on illegal immigration cost the GOP winnable races, Trump himself echoed the conventional wisdom. “When it comes to immigration, you have to do the right thing,” he said at the FAMiLY Leadership Summit, adding that “you’re dealing with lives, you’re dealing with human beings.”
This expression of compassion is of a piece with statements Trump made in 2012 arguing against the deportation of migrants who have lived “in this country for 20 years,” conceding his support for “amnesty” for long-term illegal residents and calling Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” remarks “maniacal” and “mean-spirited.”
Did Republican voters in 2016 care about the inconsistency between these comments and Trump’s attacks on the policy initiatives that flowed from this consensus view on immigration? Not one whit. Well, to quote another former GOP nominee: “What’s sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander.”
Back in 2018, when a Republican-led Congress passed — and Trump signed — a criminal-justice-reform bill, it was the popular thing to do. And not just with the voters who make up the general electorate. Polling found that two-thirds of GOP voters believe the criminal-justice system “needs significant improvements.” Eight-in-ten self-described Republicans backed alternatives to incarceration — such as community service, probation, and electronic monitoring — for nonviolent offenders. A majority of GOP voters supported dispensing with mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders and easing a convicts’ transition back into society. One survey found that the legislation that this consensus produced, the First Step Act, was viewed favorably by 60 percent of Republican voters.
Times have changed, and Republican voters’ views have changed with them. As one of the few House Republicans who didn’t back the final iteration of the First Step Act, to say nothing of his conduct in Florida’s executive mansion, DeSantis has ample credibility to attack Trump on his record on this issue, even if Trump was doing little more than following observable trends. Perhaps Trump and his defenders will mount a spirited defense of their behavior and the received wisdom upon which it was based. But so, too, did the Gang of Eight: “It seemed like a good idea at the time” just isn’t a convincing argument.