Trump is way out in front of the GOP field: His approval rating has jumped to 59%, according to the weekly tracker at Morning Consult, after his indictment on alleged mishandling of classified documents was announced last week.
But it’s a long way to crunch time, and a former Trump administration who now backs the Florida governor says DeSantis easily outpaces Trump in a very important area: getting things done.
“If you want a showman, no one will touch Donald Trump for your presidential showman," Ken Cuccinelli, a former Homeland Security deputy secretary, said of his former boss. "If you want a guy to see hard policy all the way through to implementation, Ron DeSantis is untouchable."
Cuccinelli made his blunt comments on American Family Radio Thursday in an interview with Jenna Ellis, an AFR radio host who served as the former president's personal attorney. In the interview, he praised Trump for lessons learned while working in the administration but said some of those lessons concerned him.
“I’m not anti-Trump. I love Donald Trump," he told Ellis. "I was proud to work for him, but I learned an awful lot about how effective he can and can’t be."
Cuccinelli painted a picture of a detached president who took delegating tasks to employees to an unproductive level because he failed to follow up on directives.
A policy idea without a listener
Before Cuccinelli became aware of DeSantis’ potential as a candidate, he became frustrated with Trump and Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The core of the matter, Cuccinelli said, was his effort to push through a revenue idea that would have involved foreign-born workers in high-tech jobs paying Social Security and Medicare taxes with their paychecks.
“Because they're supposedly transient, even though all of these people try to stay here permanently, they don't charge them Social Security or Medicare taxes," Cuccinelli explained. "And setting aside how silly that is, that means that hiring a tech worker from another country and firing the American in that job saves a company 15% roughly."
After convincing Trump it was a good thing, the president’s response was to have Cuccinelli call Mnuchin and handle it, but that was easier said than done.
“I couldn't even get the Secretary of Treasury on the phone. He wouldn't even return my calls," Cuccinell recalled. "It was hard enough to get the deputy secretary to return my calls. They never lifted a finger, and when I reported that back to the president, he did nothing about it."
Drawing from the experience, the former Virginia attorney general launched the “Never Back Down” PAC earlier this year to encourage DeSantis to run for president long before the governor officially claimed a spot in the race.
Cuccinelli says DeSantis’ record is the exact opposite.
In fact, one of DeSantis’ early acts as president, Cuccinelli said, would be to overturn a Trump idea that did become law – the First Step Act.
The First Step Act was a bipartisan criminal justice bill passed by Congress in 2018 with goals of reforming federal prisons and sentencing laws to reduce recidivism and the inmate population while maintaining public safety. The Act allows inmates to earn 10-15 days of “time credits” for every 30 days of successful participation recidivism-reducing programs.
It was intended to be geared toward non-violent offenders, but the inmates earning early release have gone back into society to commit violent crimes, Cuccinelli said.
“The focus of (DeSantis’) complaints is the reduction of sentences for people who then go out and commit other crimes. The crimes we’re seeing reported are not non-violent offenses,” Cuccinelli said.
Florida record: low crime, protecting kids
Cuccinelli said DeSantis’ record on this issue is buoyed a Florida crime rate at a 50-year low, and his experience in criminal justice isn’t limited to his time as governor.
“These aren’t claims without credibility. He has a track record. He's been both a civilian and a military prosecutor. Heck, he's even been on prosecution teams for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. He brings an awful lot of credibility to this issue,” Cuccinelli said.
On a second topic, Florida's children, Cuccinelli credits DeSantis for protecting children from sexualized classroom lessons with a parents rights law. Ignoring criticism from dishonest media outlets and Democrats, who called it the "Don't Say Gay" law and called him a Nazi-like book banner, the governor expanded the law to include higher grades and more school children.
DeSantis did not ignore the criticism for long, however, when TV news cameras were turned toward him.
"[DeSantis] is going through the books, the so-called book banning," Cuccinnelli recalls, "where the media, when he did a press conference on the books they were banning, he held them up and (media) were cutting their video feeds because they were inappropriate to show on their media channels.”
Many of the same media, who could not show the books DeSantis wanted banned, still criticized him for banning those books from school libraries, Cuccinelli said.
DeSantis helps GOP candidates
Another important distinction between the candidates, Cuccinelli argues, is that DeSantis cares about the Republican Party, not just himself. DeSantis was reelected by a big margin last fall but so were Republicans he worked to help along the way.
DeSantis helped deliver GOP wins across the state and in the U.S. House.
And he didn’t stop there.
“He went forward into school board races. He helped 34 candidates running for school board around Florida, and 29 of them won. They took over a majority of the Miami Dade school board while he won that county, that very difficult county, by double digits,” Cuccinelli said.
In Cuccinelli’s eyes, the candidate of substance is clear after he witnessed President Trump promise to clean up the D.C. "swamp" in only six months. Because that was only talk, then swamp took him down.
"It was all just bluster, and I've had it with bluster," Cuccinelli bluntly said. "America needs more than bluster and showmanship. It needs follow through and principle, and Ron DeSantis has been a principled, consistent conservative for 10 years.”
