Over the weekend, Trumpworld was full of demands that Ron DeSantis leap to the defense of the former president over the rumor (started by Trump, but likely based in the reality of an escalating investigation) that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is about to indict Donald Trump over how his business accounted for payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence during the 2016 presidential campaign about an affair she says she had with Trump around the time of Melania’s pregnancy with Barron. There is no real dispute that Trump made the payments, although he (rather implausibly, given his character and the size of the payoffs) denies the affair.

DeSantis, of course, has yet another needle to thread. On the one hand, it is in his interests to knock Bragg, both because the DA is unpopular with the Republican base but also because the prosecution is rightly viewed as outrageous by most Republicans, ranging from Trump diehards to Trump haters to moderates such as Chris Sununu. On the other hand, it is not at all in DeSantis’s interests to help Trump out of yet another mess of Trump’s own making. So, having waited for his own moment to address the issue, DeSantis came out this morning swinging hard at Bragg for being a Soros-funded progressive prosecutor who prefers political stunts to enforcing the law against violent criminals. He notes that “the real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans” suffering from rising crime — subtly reminding the audience that Trump is not the real victim, and unsubtly adding that he (DeSantis) is the only governor in the country to remove such a prosecutor (an emphasis on something DeSantis has actually done with power is a core part of his brand). He avoids commenting on the as-yet unissued indictment itself without seeing it or the evidence.

And then, DeSantis twists the knife into Trump by noting one area that is outside of the governor’s personal experience: “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. I can’t speak to that.” He later makes a second reference to “porn-star hush-money payments”:

I commented yesterday on Twitter that this could be a profitable avenue of two-pronged attack against both Trump and Bragg: “It’s not hard to just repeatedly argue that there isn’t actually any law against cheating on your third wife or paying hush money to cover up your affair with a porn star.” So, I’m interested to see that DeSantis is thinking in similar terms. Will it work? My longstanding view, which I reiterated last fall during the flap over Trump’s tax returns, is that once you’re the president, voters don’t tend to care about new revelations about the pre-presidential past, whether that be Bill Clinton’s affairs in Arkansas or George W. Bush’s National Guard service or Trump’s personal finances. They judge the man when he seeks the office, then after that, they judge his performance.

That said, the conventional wisdom that Trump is immune to attacks on his serial infidelity and sexual predation is largely based on the Access Hollywood controversy. But that erupted weeks before a general election in which the choice was Trump or Hillary Clinton, and it was mostly about Trump’s crude mouth and braggadocio, both of which were very well known. His tabloid-cover affair with Marla Maples was a quarter-century before his presidency. This, however, was an especially sleazy affair during his current marriage that he was continuing to conceal during the 2016 campaign. Just because it is largely priced into Trump’s image doesn’t mean that there is no political benefit to be gained at the margins, among primary voters, in reminding people of the contrast between the once-married family man DeSantis and the long trail of sleaze around Trump. That can still play into the weariness of a lot of socially conservative voters who have stuck by Trump for what he could accomplish but are tired of his bad example.

This is hardly the sort of magic bullet that will take down Trump — it would be foolhardy to build this into a major theme — but in a campaign that could be closely fought and require DeSantis to chip away at the least-committed margins of Trump supporters, it is worth taking a few swipes. And the obvious relish with which DeSantis wields the dagger suggests that, even as he aims to woo Trump voters, he is not planning a complete hands-off approach to Trump’s vulnerabilities.