A gross new ad from a political action committee backing former President Donald Trump slams Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for supporting cuts to popular retirement programs and eating pudding with his fingers (allegedly).
“DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements,” a narrator says of the likely 2024 presidential candidate as a man in a suit sticks three fingers into a cup of chocolate pudding.
The man then inserts the fingers into his pudding-smeared mouth as the narrator says DeSantis supports “cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security ― even raising our retirement age.”
The pudding content comes from a March report in The Telegraph that said a former DeSantis “staff worker” claimed to have seen the governor eat pudding with three fingers.
The policy content comes from DeSantis’ days as a member of Congress, when he voted in favor of symbolic Republican budget plans in the early 2010s that would have cut benefits and raised the eligibility age for both Social Security and Medicare to 70. Reforming entitlements had been a pet project of former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and it wasn’t a controversial policy position among Republicans at the time.
Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has sought to differentiate himself from other Republicans by speaking out against cuts to Social Security and Medicare, though as president he suggested he was open to reducing spending in the programs and proposed modest cuts as part of his symbolic budget documents.
This year, Trump warned Republicans not to touch Social Security or Medicare in their spending standoff with President Joe Biden, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) quickly fell in line.
Cutting retirement programs is politically unpopular. Even though voters say they worry about the long-term financing of Social Security and Medicare, which face shortfalls in the coming decade, most don’t support benefit cuts.
It’s not the first ad from the MAGA Inc. political action committee highlighting DeSantis’ past position on Social Security and Medicare as the governor gears up for a presidential run. A previous spot released in March said “DeSantis voted three separate times to cut Social Security.”