Two new Republican challengers are set to enter the scramble for the party’s presidential nomination this week: Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. DeSantis has been a punching bag for former President Donald Trump for months now in a way that feels like retribution for DeSantis getting too much good press from early polling last year. And in a new ad released Friday, we got a taste of how weird the run-up to the Republican National Convention will be.
DeSantis has gotten several nicknames from Trump, including the clunky “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Nicknaming is usually a tried-and-true bullying tactic for Trump — see classics of the genre like “Little Marco” and “Low Energy Jeb” — but none of them have seemed to stick to DeSantis. I can only assume a late-night round of riffing at Mar-a-Lago gave us the newest iteration featured in Friday’s ad: “Ron DeSales Tax.”
Set to the tune of “Old MacDonald,” the ad hits DeSantis for supporting a national sales tax while in Congress. It’s the second such ad in as many weeks to focus on the issue, accurately noting that the middle class would feel the brunt of the 23% tax rate that it would instill. And it feels particularly gleeful in torching what was once far-right orthodoxy. Honestly, if you strip out the reference to “Biden’s inflation,” it could have been the masterwork of any Democratic campaign in a swing district.
The Fair Tax Act of 2015, which DeSantis co-sponsored, would have levied that 23% sales tax as a replacement for “the current income and corporate income tax, employment and self-employment taxes, and estate and gift taxes.” The bill also would have blocked all funding to the IRS after 2019 and, weirdly enough, canceled itself if the 16th Amendment, which first authorized an income tax, wasn’t repealed within seven years of the bill becoming law.
In a pre-Trump world, that was absolutely the kind of nutty tax policy that was the provenance…
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