Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump has gone on the attack against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential rival for the Republican nomination in 2024 – bashing the governor over everything from pandemic policy to Social Security.
CNN looked into the accuracy of seven of the assertions Trump has made about DeSantis this month, many of them in a lengthy written statement last week that Trump also turned into a series of posts on his social media platform.
One of Trump’s claims was an exaggeration about temporary restrictions DeSantis put in place early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Another claim was a misleading comparison between the number of votes Trump and DeSantis received in Florida. A third claim was a repeated inaccuracy in Trump’s oft-told story about why he decided to endorse DeSantis’s first campaign for governor.
Two Trump claims, about Florida’s numbers on crime and Covid-19, were correct but left out critical context about the size of Florida’s population. And the two other Trump claims – about DeSantis’s past votes on Social Security and Medicare and about where Florida stands in a certain set of rankings – were accurate.
Trump claimed in the written statement last week: “Surprise, Ron was a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus, sealing all beaches and everything else for an extended period of time.”
Facts First: Trump exaggerated. DeSantis never sealed “all” beaches in Florida, though he did impose significant restrictions on beaches, businesses and individual movement at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 – at the time that Trump was calling for a national effort to minimize in-person contact and large gatherings.
Amid concern prompted by viral images of Florida beaches filled with students on spring break, DeSantis issued an executive order on March 17, 2020, that…
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