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For a Republican presidential campaign, it's probably never a good time to trash military service. But it should especially be avoided over Memorial Day weekend, which was when Team Trump decided to dismiss Ron DeSantis's record of service as gloss on an otherwise self-promoting career.
The clash began when a Trump campaign spokeswoman claimed that the Florida governor's history of seeking elected office was evidence that he's "someone who's in it for himself" and not the country. DeSantis's rapid-response team responded to the claims with a picture of DeSantis in uniform serving overseas.
The spokeswoman answered with a picture of Pete Buttigieg in uniform, as if to dismiss DeSantis's record. Then an outside Trump surrogate doubled down, publishing images of Representative Dan Crenshaw, former representative Adam Kinzinger, and the late senator John McCain, claiming they had also "use[d] the veteran card" to distract from their "corrupt actions as politicians."
The DeSantis team, not to be outdone, shot back: "Team Trump: Being in the military doesn't mean s**t. Happy Memorial Day."
This kind of Twitter skirmish interests political journalists and maybe some of the readers of this newsletter. But if DeSantis wants his message to get across to voters, he will have to contrast his record of service with Trump's record of self-promotion on the stump. He got an early start on that front during his campaign kickoff speech in Iowa on Tuesday, highlighting his background as someone who worked minimum-wage jobs through school and who risked "the loss of personal income" to enter the military after September 11, 2001, setting up an implied contrast with Trump, who was born into wealth and avoided the military draft during the Vietnam War five times.
Serving his country, DeSantis said, was "worth more than anything money can buy."
After graduating from Harvard Law School, DeSantis enrolled in the Navy and served in the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps in Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He was honorably discharged from active duty in 2010 and served in the U.S. Navy Reserve until 2019.
After swings through Iowa and New Hampshire, DeSantis will head to South Carolina this week, where military votes make up a key portion of the electorate. The state is home to 15 military bases, and active military personnel made up 729 out of every 100,000 people in the state as of 2020 — the eighth-highest share among the 50 states.
He is slated to visit Beaufort, which is home to a military hospital and Marine air base.
In April, before he formally joined the race, DeSantis met with military veterans and local law enforcement at a veteran-owned coffee shop in Summerville, S.C.
DeSantis said in an interview over Memorial Day weekend that there would be "very big changes in the services" to "rejuvenate morale" if he is elected president.
"I see a lot of emphasis now on political ideologies, things like gender pronouns. I see a lot about things like DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], and I think that that's caused recruiting to plummet. I think it's driven off a lot of warriors and I think morale is low."
Meanwhile, in the week since he officially joined the presidential race, DeSantis has shown an increasing willingness to take on Trump on a variety of issues.
While DeSantis didn't mention Trump by name in his campaign kickoff speech in West Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday, he set up several subtle comparisons between himself and the former president and got in a few veiled shots.
"I've been listening to these politicians talk about securing the border for years and years and years," DeSantis told a crowd of more than a thousand at the Eternity Church on Tuesday. "I can tell you, if I'm president, this will finally be the time where we bring this issue to a conclusion."
The two candidates have also gone back and forth over DeSantis's record of leadership during the pandemic.
DeSantis said Tuesday that Florida "chose freedom over Fauci-ism" during Covid. "You do not empower somebody like Fauci," he said, taking an indirect shot at Trump. "You bring him into the office and tell him to pack his bags."
The comment came days after Trump suggested that disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo handled Covid better in New York than DeSantis did in Florida. Cuomo jumped into the fray to say, "Donald Trump tells the truth, finally."
DeSantis responded to the former president's comments during a press gaggle after his stump speech on Tuesday: "The former president is now attacking me, saying that Cuomo did better handling Covid than Florida did. I can tell you this, I could count the number of Republicans in this country on my hands that would rather have lived in New York under Cuomo than lived in Florida in our freedom zone."
DeSantis's campaign kickoff speech touched on his legislative successes in Florida and, at times, was reminiscent of Trump's own rhetoric about taking on the "elites."
The Iowa swing, which began Tuesday night but continues with four more events in the Hawkeye State on Wednesday, comes weeks after DeSantis made a trip to Iowa in which he interacted one-on-one with voters on the same day that Trump canceled his own rally in Des Moines because of "severe weather." DeSantis joked about it on Tuesday: "We were not actually scheduled to come to the Des Moines area, but before we decamped back to Florida the weather was so nice that we felt we just had to come back and pay everyone a little bit of a visit."
Trump is slated to return to Iowa on Wednesday and will participate in a pre-taped Fox News town hall moderated by Sean Hannity on Thursday, which is set to air later that same day.
Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, who has said she will not endorse in the caucuses, appeared at the DeSantis event on Tuesday and noted the media's comparisons between Florida and Iowa, which has been dubbed the "Florida of the north" under her leadership.
DeSantis repeated his previous suggestion that he would serve two terms, if elected. He told Fox News over the weekend that, if he is elected, there will be "no more excuses about why we couldn't get it done."
The Florida governor also addressed Republican criticism of his ongoing feud with Disney during his speech on Tuesday, saying there "will be no compromise" on the issue.
Over the weekend, DeSantis turned his battle with Disney around on Trump: "He's taken the side of Disney in our fight down here in Florida," DeSantis said of Trump. "I'm standing for parents. I'm standing for children, and I think a multi-billion dollar company that sexualizes children is not consistent with the values of Florida or the values of a place like Iowa."
During an interview with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, the governor also called out Trump's displays of weakness on immigration, on signing a "jailbreak" bill into law, and for not having control over his own administration.
He said Trump has been "attacking me by moving left."
"So this is a different guy than 2015, 2016," he added.
Meanwhile, the Republican field is set to get even bigger as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is slated to announce his own entry into the race during a town-hall event at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire on June 6.
An adviser said that Christie, a Trump ally turned Trump critic, plans on running "a non-traditional campaign that is highly focused on earned media, mixing it up in the news cycle and engaging Trump," according to Axios. Christie, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016, has been willing to take shots at both Republican front-runners.
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