On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and one of Trump’s challengers for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — had over-reacted in his response to the coronavirus pandemic in his state.
“He shut down Florida,” Trump claimed in the interview. “It was tight as a drum. He had vax lines. He was vaxxing everything. Now, he talks about the vaccinations this and that.”
But that’s not what the Trump White House was saying during the actual pandemic, just days before Trump left office.
A message from the Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force on Jan. 10, 2021, warned DeSantis that his state was “in the red zone for cases” of COVID and that “active and aggressive immunization” using the vaccines developed under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed was necessary to “save lives.”
“Florida must increase both statewide and local public mitigation,” the note said. “Increase communication around the importance of personal mitigation with masking, physical distancing, and avoiding family gatherings.”
In other words, no matter how locked down Florida was under DeSantis, the Trump administration was saying it wasn’t enough.
But that was then, and this is now.
“[W]hen Ron DeSantis says on the debate stage you didn’t fire Fauci and you shut down the country and that was a mistake, how will you respond?” Hewitt asked Trump.
“Okay, you ready? It’s so easy to respond,” Trump responded, according to a transcript of the interview. “He said … he wouldn’t let anybody come in. He shut down his beaches. He shut down the entire state.
“He tries, he has a selective memory. He shut down. Henry McMaster didn’t shut down South Carolina. Krisi Noem didn’t shut down South Dakota.”
It was Trump’s administration, however, pushing DeSantis in 2021 to be more restrictive, not less.
The Trump White House also pushed DeSantis to work on “maintaining public confidence and maximizing vaccine acceptance.”
“Florida must increase both statewide and local public mitigation,” it said [emphasis added].
You can see the entire “State Report” below and judge for yourself.
Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force Report by The Western Journal on Scribd
The DeSantis campaign, of course, wasted no time in capitalizing on this apparent about-face from the former president.
“January of 2021, weeks before [Trump] left office, they were sending us missives to Florida saying ‘impose a mask mandate and close bar and restaurants and businesses,” DeSantis said at a recent event. “And that’s what they were pushing. And that was pretty much uniform throughout the political and bureaucratic sphere.”
“So we had to be the ones to stand in the breech on that,” he added.
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