OPINION:
If attacking political opponents were an Olympic event, former President Donald Trump would be Michael Phelps. Let’s face it — he’s good at it. When no one thought he could do it, he took his penchant for nicknames and zingers to 16 other Republican presidential candidates in 2016 and dispatched them all. For better or worse, his presidency was a free-fire zone.
Now, attempting to win back the White House against a growing field of opponents, he’s trained his sights on Florida’s popular governor, Ron DeSantis. He’s called him “DeSanctimonious.” Not sure it will stick the way “Crooked Hillary” did, but it’s not bad. He has claimed that if he hadn’t helped the governor, Mr. DeSantis would be working in “a pizza parlor,” and his campaign has said that Mr. DeSantis has left “a wake of destruction all across Florida.”
While everyone from Mr. Trump, who moved to the Sunshine State during his presidency, to the NAACP seems to be trashing Florida these days, the state is consistently rated one of the nation’s best places to live for a host of reasons. Mr. Trump has hit Mr. DeSantis’ record on everything from education to crime.
He has also gone after the governor’s record on COVID-19.
While the Biden administration’s misinformation campaign about COVID-19 vaccines, demonization of the unvaccinated, mass firings and attacks on civil liberties have overtaken the Trump White House record in the minds of many, Mr. DeSantis may choose to remind them.
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Mr. Trump’s repeated broadsides against Mr. DeSantis over COVID-19 decision-making make his own COVID-19 record fair game.
The DeSantis campaign is already firing back, releasing a video montage of the dozens of times the former president took credit for locking down the country.
The big question now is whether the DeSantis campaign will go further.
While Mr. Trump has attempted to distance himself from Dr. Anthony Fauci, it is indisputable that the now-infamous public health bureaucrat was a principal architect of the Trump COVID-19 strategy. He was at the then-president’s side through 2020. Dr. Fauci was allowed by the administration to do hundreds of interviews even after physicians, scientists and elected officials questioned his recommendations on masking, lockdowns and social distancing, as well as his opposition to natural immunity, therapeutics and risk stratification.
Physicians who advocated alternative strategies to handle the virus were often boxed out of the policymaking process.
Mr. Trump never fired Dr. Fauci or even sidelined him, likely because he was concerned about public blowback.
Mr. Trump also often bragged about the success of Operation Warp Speed in providing COVID-19 vaccines. Those shots turned out not to be vaccines at all, as they didn’t stop infection or transmission as promised. They were, at best, an advance treatment for older adults and those with compromised immune systems. Ultimately, they would be used as a cudgel to attack Americans’ civil liberties.
Mr. Trump’s administration also gave the big vaccine manufacturers immunity against lawsuits in the event the hastily conceived drugs were responsible for side effects.
The Trump administration also knew that mortality rate, case and death counts were being manipulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, hospitals and other sources, but did little to correct that misinformation. The former president’s campaign is now using those numbers to attack Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. Trump doesn’t get enough credit for calling for the reopening of in-person education and the economy, despite vicious attacks from Democrats. But like other presidents before him dealing with exigent situations, he became captive to the so-called government experts who were advising him, a point conceded by Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Mr. DeSantis was running the third-largest state in the nation, one with a large population of older adults. Still, he attempted to get his economy and schools open faster than other large states and appointed a surgeon general who refused to play Dr. Fauci’s game of fear-mongering.
Going after Mr. DeSantis over his COVID-19 record is a big gamble for the Trump campaign. Lots of conservatives were rightly appalled by the government’s response to COVID-19. It was a power grab that threatened our freedom, unlike anything we’ve experienced in our nation’s history.
But Mr. Trump couldn’t resist. As a consequence, he may have exposed a weak spot unnecessarily.
Challenging or even attacking an opponent is all part of a campaign, but it must be done smartly, or it can boomerang, even on a political force and a master attacker like Donald Trump.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax and the author of “Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq.” He served as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from 2003 to 2004.
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