UPDATED: 30 MAR 2023 09:04 PM EST
A super PAC aligned with former President Donald Trump is launching early, national attack ads hitting Ron DeSantis over the Florida governor’s past support for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
“Think you know Ron DeSantis? Think again,” a narrator says at the start of the ad, which the super PAC posted on Twitter Thursday afternoon. “In Congress, DeSantis voted three separate times to cut Social Security.”
The ad closes: “The more you see about DeSantis, the more you see he doesn’t share our values. He’s not ready to be president.”
The ads will run on Fox News Channel, CNN and Newsmax and will cost MAGA, Inc., the super PAC, just over $1.3 million for a week’s worth of spots. The ads will begin airing on Friday — immediately following news of Trump's indictment in New York — according to AdImpact, a company tracking ad buys.
A MAGA, Inc., spokesperson, Alex Pfeiffer, said in a statement that Social Security and Medicare were two examples of issues on which “President Trump is on the side of the American people, and DeSantis is on the side of the D.C. establishment insiders.”
The group, Pfeiffer added, intends to expose “how unelectable DeSantis is.”
A DeSantis spokesperson declined to comment on the ad.
In DeSantis’ last GOP primary campaign, the 2018 Florida governor’s race, opponent Adam Putnam leveled similar charges about him, saying in ads that DeSantis “voted to cut Social Security and Medicare.” Politifact, the fact-checking website, called Putnam’s ads an exaggeration of DeSantis’ record of voting for non-binding budget resolutions offered by conservative Republicans in the House.
DeSantis, with Trump’s endorsement, easily defeated Putnam to win the primary, then narrowly edged Democrat Andrew Gillum in the general election.
The ads are notable for two reasons: DeSantis has not actually launched a presidential campaign yet, though he is widely expected to; and it is exceedingly rare for a leading Republican to make preserving social insurance programs the first theme of his presidential campaign. But Trump has proven to be an unconventional Republican when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, long criticizing his fellow party members for targeting those entitlements.
MAGA, Inc., launched in September 2022 as Trump’s main vehicle for supporting candidates in that year’s midterm elections. Trump seeded the group with $20 million in October of last year, through his leadership PAC, Save America.
At the federal level, MAGA, Inc., supported Senate candidates in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania, making a total of $15 million in independent expenditures. The group spent another $500,000 on ads supporting Tudor Dixon, the GOP nominee for governor in Michigan.
Of those candidates, only now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) won. The other five Republicans — Dixon, Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania — lost.
Natalie Allison contributed to this report.
