Just last week, Trump released an ad heavily featuring pudding while attacking Ron DeSantis. He chose to release it in Florida as well.
The ad is a novel one. It opens with a man walking up to a jar of pudding, while the narrator says, “Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong. And we’re not just talking about pudding. DeSantis has his sticky fingers all over senior entitlements.” The ad notes how DeSantis voted to cut Medicare and social security, while raising the retirement age to 70. It concludes asking the Florida audience to tell “Ron DeSantis to keep his pudding fingers off our money.” The whole time, a faceless man is stuffing pudding into his face, while close shots of said pudding peppers the ad.
Certainly a progressive take on things, but a smart approach for Trump to take. Most GOP voters would be thought of as more economically conservative, and therefore supportive of healthcare cuts. But Trump knows there is a big populist base out there, and originally, he did in part, win the nomination because of his stances that strayed from his party’s orthodoxy. DeSantis, for better or for worse, has towed the party line through and through on economic and social issues.
So DeSantis came swinging back with an outside PAC run by former conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, although the ad starts with some deference towards Trump.
The ad opens with an acknowledgement that “Donald Trump is being attacked by a Democrat prosecutor in New York,” but then quickly pivots saying, “so why is he spending millions attacking the Republican Governor of Florida? He’s stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook, repeating lies about social security. But here’s the truth from Governor Ron DeSantis.” They then cut to a clip of him saying “we’re not gonna mess with social security as Republicans.” The narrator then asks, “what did Trump say?” They cut to a quote of Trump saying entitlement cuts, at some point, will be on the table. The narrator concludes that Trump should fight Democrats instead of “lying about Governor DeSantis.”
The problem with DeSantis’s punchback, however, is that he actually didn’t deny he made votes that Trump has accused him of making. Especially voting to cut social security three times. There’s no direct defense on here because one simply doesn’t exist. It’s a light blowback that won’t likely help improve the Florida governor’s numbers.
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