Former president Donald Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., has now spent more money on attack ads targeting Florida governor Ron DeSantis than it previously did on supporting Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms.
Trump, who is the current frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race, has launched a series of attacks against DeSantis, who is expected to enter the race this week. MAGA Inc. has spent $15.3 million attacking the Republican governor and just $1,500 on supporting Trump.
In the 2022 midterms, the PAC spent $15 million to support Republican candidates in the key swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio and Nevada. Republicans lost Senate races in four out of those five states, with only Ohio Republican J.D. Vance securing a win.
A spokesperson for DeSantis said the figures make clear that Trump views DeSantis as a threat.
“These are the largest ongoing expenditures against a non-candidate in Republican primary history, and that’s all you need to know to draw the obvious conclusion: Governor DeSantis presents the best option for defeating Joe Biden,” DeSantis political team press secretary Bryan Griffin told National Review.
MAGA Inc., which was first launched to support Republicans in the midterms, has made clear in a series of recent ads that it views DeSantis’s past views on entitlement reform as a weakness heading into 2024.
MAGA Inc. launched a 30-second video of a man eating chocolate pudding with his fingers last month — a play on a Daily Beast report that claimed DeSantis once ate a pudding cup with three fingers in lieu of a spoon while traveling on a private plane in 2019.
But while the ad grabs viewers with its uncomfortable imagery, the spot ultimately does not concern DeSantis’s eating habits but rather is just the latest example of Trump’s team hitting DeSantis on entitlements.
“Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong. And we’re not just talking about pudding,” a voice-over says. “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements, like cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security, and even raising our retirement age.”
“Tell Ron DeSantis to keep his pudding fingers off our money,” the video adds. “Oh, and get this man a spoon!”
The “Pudding Fingers” ad follows a 30-second ad that MAGA Inc. debuted in March also attacking DeSantis’s record on entitlements.
DeSantis voted for three non-binding resolutions between 2013 and 2015 that called for raising the retirement age to 70 and reducing benefits for millions of earners. Trump’s attacks on DeSantis’s entitlement record resemble those leveled by Adam Putnam during the 2018 Florida gubernatorial primary — attacks that left-leaning Politifact classified as misleading given that DeSantis voted for non-binding budget resolutions that, even if adopted, would not have changed federal law and would not have therefore cut benefits for any Americans.
And Trump is equally vulnerable to that line of attack.
Trump’s 2020 budget proposal included cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. The proposal outlined an aim to spend $25 billion less on Social Security in the next decade and $845 billion less on Medicare over that same period of time. The proposal also would have allocated $1.2 trillion in a block-grant program to states for Medicaid, in an effort to spend $1.5 trillion less on that program over ten years.
DeSantis is expected to formally enter the race for president this week, according to the Wall Street Journal. The outlet says DeSantis’s team has decided to file formal paperwork with the Federal Election Commission declaring his candidacy next week as donors meet in Miami on May 25. A formal campaign kickoff event is expected to follow but it is not clear when.
A RealClearPolitics average of national polls has Trump leading the race with 56.3 percent support. DeSantis is a distant second with 19.4 percent support, despite having not formally entered yet.