On issue after issue, Trump and DeSantis attack one another for positions they once held themselves.
It was perhaps the most instructive moment of the confounding early battles between the Trump and DeSantis campaigns. Here was Team Trump attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for having said nice things about FBI director Christopher A. Wray upon his nomination in 2017, but now saying he would fire Wray. Left unstated: the fact that then-President Donald Trump himself nominated Wray, also said nice things at the time, and has also talked about firing him.
This has been the story of the top two contenders in the GOP primary thus far. Shorn of firm policy differences and fighting over the same voters — and with Team DeSantis leery of going after Trump’s personal issues — they have repeatedly thrown stones at one another from their own glass houses.
The ’s Glenn Kessler, in The Fact Checker, recently recapped how that’s the case with the Trump team’s early attack ads on DeSantis’s past support for entitlement reform and the “Fair Tax,” each of which Trump previously promoted himself. But it has also stretched into other issue areas, and the DeSantis campaign’s hands aren’t exactly clean, either.
Over the weekend, DeSantis aides went after Trump for supposedly playing into the left’s hands by promoting the cause of Black Lives Matter protesters after George Floyd’s murder. They shared a 2020 tweet and video from a Trump campaign account that said, “President Trump stands with Americans mourning George Floyd and demanding equal justice under the law.” It quoted Trump citing the “horror, anger and grief” people were feeling.
