DeSantis Ad Asks: ‘What Happened to Donald Trump?’

A new ad by a super PAC supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launched an attack on former President Donald Trump in its first television ad.

The ad focuses in on Trump’s aggression toward DeSantis ahead of the governor announcing that he will be campaigning.

“Donald Trump is being attacked by a Democrat prosecutor in New York,” a voiceover in the new ad says. “So why is he spending millions attacking the Republican governor of Florida? Trump’s stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook.”

The ad also hits Trump on his remarks against DeSantis’s comments on Social Security.

When DeSantis was a member of the US House, he voted for a 2013 resolution that would have raised the age to qualify for Medicare and Social Security to 70.

In a flipflop, the Florida governor now says Republicans should avoid making changes to the programs in their negotiations over spending cuts and the budget.

Trump has been a strong supporter of social entitlement programs. In a video message to Republicans in Congress early this year, he said, “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.”

Despite his comments, the new ad plays a clip of Trump in an interview from the 2020 World Economic Forum when he broadly said he would consider cuts to entitlement programs “at some point.”

The ad concludes by urging Trump to focus on fighting Democrats instead of DeSantis.

While most polls continue to show Trump well ahead of DeSantis in a hypothetical primary election, they are expected to go head to head in a vicious matchup until the nomination takes place next year.

Some swing state surveys show DeSantis ahead of President Joe Biden in states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania, which DeSantis supporters point to as they make the case that he is more electable than the former president.