A dirty new ad from a political action committee supporting former President Donald Trump slams Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for supporting cuts to the popular pension program and eating pudding with his fingers (allegedly).
“DeSantis has a dirty finger on all senior rights,” the narrator says of the likely 2024 presidential candidate as a man in a suit dips three fingers into a cup of chocolate pudding.
The man then puts his finger into his pudding-smeared mouth as the narrator says DeSantis supports “cutting Medicare, cutting Social Security — even raising the retirement age.”
The pudding content comes from a March report in the Telegraph that said DeSantis’ former “staff member” claimed to have seen the governor eat pudding with three fingers.
The content of the policy dates back to DeSantis’ days as a member of Congress, when he voted to pass a symbolic Republican budget plan in the early 2010s that would have cut benefits and raised the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 70. Rights reform has been a pet project of the former Speaker. House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and it was not a controversial policy position among Republicans at the time.
Since the 2016 campaign, Trump has sought to distinguish himself from other Republicans by speaking out against cuts to Social Security and Medicare, although as president he proposed that he be open to reducing spending on these programs and proposing modest cuts as part of a symbolic budget document. .
This year, Trump warned Republicans not to touch Social Security or Medicare during a spending spree with President Joe Biden, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) quickly fell for it.
Eliminating the pension program is politically unpopular. Although voters say they are concerned about long-term funding for Social Security and Medicare, which face shortfalls in the coming decades, most do not support benefit cuts.
It’s not the first ad from political action committee MAGA Inc. which highlights DeSantis’ past positions on Social Security and Medicare as a governor running for president. An earlier point released in March said “DeSantis voted three times to cut Social Security.”