Everyone Knows Trump’s Florida Slander Is Self-Serving Nonsense

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, March 23, 2023

 

Those on the American right who continue to doubt that Donald Trump will happily burn down anything that stands between himself and his desire to lose yet another election for the GOP would do well to note that, despite being engaged at present in nothing more consequential than a nascent shadow primary, he has already reached the point at which he is willing to sully the reputation of his home state of Florida in exchange for a mess of pottage. In a wildly misleading Truth Social post, published this morning, Trump cast Florida as being among “the worst in the Country” for “crime,” “Education,” “Health & Safety,” “Education & Childcare,” “Affordability,” and “COVID-19 Deaths.” “HARDLY GREATNESS THERE!” he concluded.

 

With friends like these . . .

 

One suspects that it may be futile to begin debating facts with a man who is now prepared to venture with a straight face that Ron DeSantis was “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” (Ah, yes, that’s what he’s famous for!) But here goes nothing: Trump is wrong. And, worse still, not only is Trump wrong — he knows that he’s wrong. There is a reason that 850 people per day now elect to move to Florida — a number that, in 2021, included a certain Donald J. Trump — and it is not that the state is an ignorant, crime-ridden, impossibly expensive hellhole. On the contrary: Life is pretty good here. On Truth Social, Trump claimed that Florida is in the bottom-half of the country for education; per U.S. News and World Report, it actually ranks third overall and first in higher education. He claimed that Florida is “among the worst in the Country and on crime statistics”; it’s actually below the national average in both violent crime and property crime. He claimed that Florida is 50th in affordability; it’s actually 31st overall and eighth for retirees. Do you notice a pattern?

 

Earlier this week, I proposed that conservatives are on the cusp of an important choice: They can choose to elevate Donald Trump within the Republican Party, or they can choose to advance conservatism using the Republican Party, but they cannot do both. Trump’s attack on Florida is a solid example of what I meant. If Donald Trump thinks that he’d be a better presidential candidate than Ron DeSantis, he of course has every right to say so. But to pretend that the most successful Republican-run state in the country is a toxic disaster area that is saved only by its fortunate abundance of “Ocean & Sunshine” is something else altogether. Naturally, if one cares solely about the cultish advancement of Donald Trump, it doesn’t especially matter that Trump is now criticizing precisely the sort of conservative governance that, at least in theory, he is promising that he’ll bring to Washington, D.C. If one cares about advancing conservative governance, however, it matters a great deal. Usually, progressives maintain that Trump is such an unparalleled menace that he must be kept away from social media, and from polite society more broadly. Today, those same progressives are frantically endorsing and amplifying his denunciation of Florida. Why, I wonder, do Trump’s acolytes believe that is?

 

And why does it not bother them? Recently, Trump has taken to insisting that “Florida was doing GREAT long before Ron DeSanctus got there.” “Florida,” Trump wrote this morning, “has been successful for many years, long before I put Ron there.” Which . . . well, which doesn’t make much sense as an argument, does it? Certainly, it is true that Florida was doing well prior to 2018. (A big reason for this was the series of reforms that was pushed through by the one recent governor that Trump cannot bring himself to mention: Jeb Bush.) But if Florida really were now a state in which crime was rampant, education was a joke, and residents couldn’t afford basic necessities, then Trump wouldn’t describe it as “great” — let alone as “GREAT” — or concede that it has been “successful for many years,” or suggest that “people are fleeing from New York to Florida and other places because of high taxes and out-of-control crime.” As a rule, Americans do not move from places with “out-of-control crime” to places with even more out-of-control crime, just as they do not choose to live in places with bad schools or move from cheap places to expensive places or get out of areas with stringent lockdowns to seek out the policies of “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” The notion is transparently, self-servingly, brazenly stupid — and all of us know it full well.