The Horse Race: Trump Parrots Left-Wing Attacks on DeSantis, Cozies Up to CNN

with Brittany Bernstein

Wednesday, May 03, 2023

Trump Parrots Left-Wing Attacks on DeSantis, Cozies Up to CNN

Former president Donald Trump's decision to participate in a CNN town hall next week came as a surprise to many given his history of deriding the network as "fake news." But Team Trump is reportedly trying to spin Trump's appearance as an act of bravery.

"President Trump is running to be President for all Americans. Going outside the traditional Republican 'comfort zone' was a key to President Trump's success in 2016," a senior Trump adviser told the Daily Caller in explaining the decision to participate. "Some other candidates are too afraid to take this step in their quest to defeat Joe Biden, and are afraid to do anything other than Fox News."

"CNN executives made a compelling pitch," the adviser said. The event, which will be held in New Hampshire, will be hosted by Kaitlan Collins and will air on May 10 at 9 p.m. ET.

The approach is similar to that of GOP contender Vivek Ramaswamy, who tweeted ahead of his appearance on NBC's Meet the Press: "If you want to face down Xi Jinping, you can't hide from @NBCNews."

Trump's decision to appear on the network comes as he has faced criticism over his attacks on Florida governor Ron DeSantis, which have strangely relied on left-leaning sources.

Late last month, Trump shared a link to an article from MSNBC's The ReidOut blog along with an excerpt: "Ron DeSantis' D.C. charm offensive was a massive failure—Florida's governor, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, may have been looking for a coronation when he met lawmakers in Washington. He got a clown show, instead."

And in a press release, "The Real Ron DeSantis Playbook," the Trump campaign cited data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Florida Policy Institute as evidence that the Sunshine State is falling into "complete and total delinquency and destruction" under DeSantis's leadership. The former group is "dedicated to achieving racially and socially equitable public policy," while the latter is a left-of-center research institute.

In attacking DeSantis's record on Covid last month, Trump took a page from the Rebekah Jones playbook and suggested that Florida's Covid numbers "weren't what they pretended to be."

"Well actually if you look at the numbers, he didn't do a great job. If you take a look at the numbers, he's very high on crime," Trump said on the Full Send Podcast. "Very high, right at the top. Almost at the top. I think he gets good publicity, although now people are starting 'cause I'm putting out the Covid numbers, he didn't do well on Covid. He had more deaths than almost every country in Florida. I hate to say it 'cause Florida's my state, but he did not do well."

"It's really, it's very interesting," he added. "I don't wanna knock anybody, but the thing he did well on was public relations, because the numbers weren't what they pretended to be."

That conspiracy is in line with claims made by Jones, who alleged that, during her time at the Florida Department of Health, the state was misrepresenting the number of Covid-related deaths. Jones's claims were ultimately debunked, and she was fired in 2020 for insubordination.

Once you account for Florida's elderly population and the speed with which DeSantis reopened the state, the Florida governor's Covid record comes out looking pretty impressive. It also stands in sharp contrast to then-president Trump's deference to Dr. Anthony Fauci — a line of attack DeSantis has begun to rely on during public appearances.

Trump's campaign has doubled down on its attacks on DeSantis in recent weeks. The Trump-aligned MAGA, Inc. PAC spent almost $8 million on anti-DeSantis ads in April. The group has spent just $1,500 on pro-Trump ads.

Biden is also busy crowd-testing misleading attacks in the run-up to the 2024 showdown.

The president's latest reelection ad shows that he plans to campaign on many of the same falsehoods he has touted over his first two years in office.

"When he came to office, the pandemic was raging, the economy was reeling and American democracy was under attack," the ad begins. Then, the president launches into two lies he just can't stop repeating.

Under Biden's leadership, more than 12 million jobs have been created, the ad claims. "That's more jobs than any president's created in four." It's a claim Biden has made repeatedly, including in a speech the day he announced his reelection bid.

But it's not quite true.

Biden is correct that by raw numbers, his administration has overseen a larger increase in new jobs over two years than other presidents saw in their four-year terms. The U.S. economy added 12.1 million jobs from January 2021 to January 2023. But this job growth is distorted because it followed unprecedented job losses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The economy has added just 8.5 percent more jobs under Biden. By contrast, President Barack Obama's first term saw an 8.6 percent increase, and President Bill Clinton's first term saw a 10.5 percent increase. Going further back, President Ronald Reagan's second term saw an 11.2 percent increase, President Jimmy Carter's a 12.8 percent increase.

The Biden ad goes on to cite a series of accomplishments: "Historic laws have been passed to rebuild the nation's roads and bridges, to invest in computer chips that will power the future, to tackle the climate crisis and to lower the cost of prescription drugs." It claims that the president "did it all this while lowering the deficit by $1.7 trillion and without raising taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year."

That remark about lowering the deficit has earned a "bottomless Pinocchio" from the Washington Post's fact-checker — a rating reserved for lies told repeatedly. The claim was given a three-Pinocchio rating in September, and Biden has repeated it at least 20 times since June.

The figure Biden is touting comes from comparing fiscal year 2022's $1.375 trillion deficit to fiscal year 2020's $3.132 trillion deficit. Yet a more accurate way to determine a president's impact is to compare what was predicted before he arrived, which accounts for the broader economic environment, with what came to fruition under his leadership. By this measure, Biden increased the national debt by $850 billion more than originally projected by the Congressional Budget Office.

And while Biden has said again and again that "anyone making under $400,000" would not see a tax increase, his rhetoric is misleading in that the $400,000 refers to the income of families, not of individuals, as he promised on the campaign trail. Also, while the Inflation Reduction Act did not directly raise taxes on that group, provisions included in the bill could act as indirect taxation on those American households, experts say.

The release of the aforementioned digital ad follows the campaign's first television ad, which aired last week and suggested that Biden intends to paint himself as the candidate who will defend American freedoms. The ad uses the word "freedom" at least seven times.

The 90-second spot, "Flag," claims Biden will defend against "an extreme movement that seeks to overturn elections, ban books and eliminate a woman's right to choose." The ad relies on euphemisms such as "freedom for women to make their own health care decisions" rather than referring to "abortion" explicitly.

The DNC paid for the ad to run on MSNBC across the country and to run on local stations in several swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Nikki Haley, meanwhile, has doubled down on her own age-based attacks, penning an op-ed for Fox News about her call for mental-competency tests for politicians over 75.

Haley cites 89-year-old senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) as a "prime example of why we need mental competency tests for politicians" and suggested that the California Democrat should "resign immediately."

She also questioned Biden's mental fitness, saying "millions of Americans watch President Biden and believe he exhibits cognitive decline."

"He rarely takes press questions," she wrote. "He spends most weekends at his vacation home in Delaware. Sadly, he often seems disoriented and confused. Yet the public can't know for sure without a cognitive test, which Biden has either not taken or declines to publish as part of his medical records."

Asa Hutchinson, meanwhile, faced questions this week about why, exactly, he is running for president.

Fox News host Lawrence Jones grilled the former Arkansas governor in a combative interview, telling Hutchinson he has not "found one person that says they want Asa Hutchinson to be the president of the United States."

"Well . . . there are people out there that would like to see me run for president. But there is certainly a gap between myself and Donald Trump who is right now leading the ticket on the Republican side," Hutchinson replied. "But that's why you have campaigns. That's why you have choices. That's why I am able to talk about the economy, my experience in law enforcement. There's no one that has more experience in law enforcement than me in terms of dealing with our border security issues and dealing with crime."

The pair later went back and forth over Hutchinson's stance on puberty blockers. Hutchinson insists that he does not support puberty blockers for minors, despite his veto of a bill to prohibit health-care providers from performing or referring minors for gender-transition procedures.

"I actually support the decision-making of parents. I vetoed a bill because it went too far," he said. "It was extreme in my judgment. . . . There have been other bills . . . that have been more balanced that are appropriate. But it's really a matter of are we going to support parents if it's not a life-threatening issue and that was the difficult decision that I had to make."

Hutchinson cited the "role of the state" and noted that he banned biological males from competing in women's sports and that he believes there are only two genders.

AROUND NR

• Dan McLaughlin says that despite the ever-growing Republican primary field, voters should not expect a "dark-horse" Republican nominee:

At this writing, the poll averages show the top two with a combined 75 percent of the vote nationally, 70 percent in New Hampshire, and nearly 70 percent in South Carolina. The victory of a dark-horse candidate would require not just his or her emergence from the single-digit tier but also the collapse of both Trump and DeSantis. That's possible, given that Trump is almost 77 and under one indictment, with more potentially on the way. But the odds are grim.

• Noah Rothman dissects the results of a new CBS News/YouGov poll and finds that it has good news and bad news for Republican primary voters hopeful that a non-Trump candidate will win the party's nomination next year:

The good news is that, with 27 percent of likely Republican primary voters "not considering Trump" and almost 50 percent more being at least open to the prospect of an alternative nominee, the non-Trump candidates in the race have a shot. But the bad news is that those non-Trump candidates must somehow win the nomination without campaigning against Trump, about whom the Republican primary electorate will not hear one bad word.

• Jeffrey Blehar offers a word of advice for beating Trump: Stay away from rehashing January 6 and Trump's indictment(s) and instead focus on the "failures of his administration that most obviously resonate with — and stick in the craws of — his own voters":

Argue that Trump ran as a purported tribune of the forgotten man, a defender of the average Joe, and when the chips were really down and a leader with a spine was needed to make the tough calls, he turned his pandemic policy over to Anthony Fauci and his crime policy over to Kim Kardashian. (For the populists, one could also add "and his economic policy over to Paul Ryan.")

• Democratic presidential candidate and anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr.'s recent polling strength undermines the party's claims that it is the "party of science," Noah Rothman writes:

RFK Jr.'s presidential bid takes aim at the very idea of what it meant to be a Democrat in the Trump years. . . . Only Democrats, they insisted, could be trusted to defer to experts in a crisis, restore empiricism to its proper place, and safeguard the environment and public health against the troglodytic masses. RFK Jr. shatters this presumption.

• But for ABC News to omit portions of its recent interview with RFK Jr. where he expanded on his anti-vaccine views was a "mistake in editorial judgment," Rich Lowry writes:

If you are going to interview RFK Jr., you should let him be RFK Jr. Editing out his position on vaccines is a little like doing a pre-recorded interview with Bernie Sanders and carefully snipping out the socialism, or cutting out Donald Trump's support for building a wall. It's one of his calling cards, and of a piece with his larger distrust of authority. Two, it shows how nothing has been learned from the pandemic. . . . Three, in a free society, we default toward letting people propagate error, and rebutting it with better arguments.