BETTENDORF, IOWA - DECEMBER 18: Republican presidential candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks to guests during the Scott County Fireside Chat at the Tanglewood Hills Pavilion on December 18, 2023 in Bettendorf, Iowa. Iowa Republicans will be the first to select their party's nomination for the 2024 presidential race when they go to caucus on January 15, 2024. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
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A day after Ron DeSantis claimed the news media wants the GOP candidates running for president to “smear” each other with personal attacks, the Florida governor took former President Donald Trump to task on several policy issues at a nationally televised town hall meeting at Grand View University in Des Moines on Thursday night.
DeSantis said that if elected, he would sign an executive order eliminating the constitutional guarantee of citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S., also known as “birthright citizenship.” While president in 2018, Trump said that he would sign an executive order to eliminate it, but never did so.
“The 14th Amendment obviously applies to U.S. citizens,” DeSantis told CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins. “It was never the intent to say, ‘you come illegally across the border, have a kid and all of a sudden, the kid is an American citizen.’ That creates an anchor in the society so that you then can’t deport the illegal aliens who came in. It’s an incentive to come in illegally. That was not the intention of that.”
DeSantis predicted that if he did sign such an executive order, it would be litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court, “and I think we would win on the law.”
The governor then followed up by bashing Trump for saying that he would do the same thing, but never did so. “What is he now telling people in Iowa this time around? He says he’s going to do the same thing that he didn’t do the first four years. I mean sometimes you can say ‘congress stymied you’ and all this other stuff. All he had to do was put his John Hancock on a piece of paper, and he did not do it. When I tell you I’m going to do something, you can take it to the bank. I’m going to do it.”
On abortion, DeSantis defended his signing of a bill last year that would ban abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions (the law has not gone into effect as the Florida Supreme Court is reviewing a legal challenge to the 15-week ban passed in 2022. If they do maintain that law, the six-week ban would go into effect short afterwards). And he said Trump was weak on the issue.
“This was a guy who was at the March for Life in January of 2020, and he said that all life was a gift from God. He said the unborn was made in the image of God. He said that there should be protections. That’s what he was saying when he was president at the March for Life. Now he’s saying it’s a terrible, terrible thing. So how do you reconcile those two views. Did he flipflop? Did he not believe it at the time?”
When Collins asked him if he thought that Trump wasn’t actually “pro-life,” DeSantis replied, “Of course not.”
“Some issues are pretty fundamental,” DeSantis added. “How do you flipflop on something like the sanctity of life?” as the audience cheered.
DeSantis has gone all in on Iowa, the first state in the country where Republican voters will be able to decide on who their presidential nominee will be in November. He’s campaigned in all 99 counties in the state and received the endorsement of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds. But time is running out on him.
There is just 10 days left before the Iowa caucuses, but polls show that the Florida governor is far behind Trump by an average of more than 30 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Worse yet for DeSantis is that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is only a few points behind him.
And it may get worse for the governor before it gets better: The next Republican race following Iowa is on Jan. 23 in New Hampshire, where DeSantis is now in fourth place, according to RealClearPolitics, behind not only Haley but former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
The town hall took place just hours after six people were shot at a high school in Perry, Iowa, approximately 40 miles northeast of Des Moines earlier in the day. DeSantis called the shooting a tragedy, and then pivoted to how he had worked to enact a comprehensive gun safety law that was passed by the Florida GOP-controlled Legislature in the immediate wake of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in February 2018 that killed 17 people.
Collins asked him about one provision in the law that GOP lawmakers now say that they want to repeal: a three-day waiting period to purchase a firearm in the state.
“I think the background checks should be instant,” he said, giving a boost to the proposed legislation. He added that if the background check reveals a criminal conviction or a mental health issue, the purchase would then be prevented. “But I think that you want instant background checks, and so that’s what I support.”
As the Biden administration continues to push for more funding for military aid for Ukraine, more Republicans have expressed limited enthusiasm for such a plan.
DeSantis was blasted shortly before he announced his candidacy in the spring when he labeled the Ukraine-Russian war a “territorial conflict” and walked the comment back, but he said on Thursday that “we need to bring it to a conclusion.”
Did that mean ending U.S. support for Ukraine? Collins asked.
“It means end the conflict,” DeSantis responded, before blasting President Biden for not giving the American people a clear message on what the U.S. objective is in the conflict. Collins again pressed him what “ending the conflict” actually meant – did that mean no more American dollars or military aid to the Volodymyr Zelensky administration?
“What it means is bringing it to a situation where Russia is in a box and you’re not having wars break out to Europe,” he said, adding that he would never send U.S. troops to fight in the conflict – something that Joe Biden said when the war began nearly two years ago. He did say that he would be willing to help out Europe “to bring it to a conclusion.”
As he had done on the campaign trail, DeSantis spoke about his own military experience, saying that if elected he would be the first veteran to serve in the White House since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
He was later asked by a Vietnam veteran if the protestors in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were displaying patriotism “as some of them claimed they did?”
“No, of course not. That was a not a good day for the country,” DeSantis quickly responded, before blasting the media and “the left” for politicizing the event. “Patriotism for me is willing to put yourself out there and put service above self.”
The hour went into a slightly different direction when Collins asked DeSantis an intensely person question: she asked him to comment on the death of his late sister Christina, who died from a sudden illness in 2015 at the age of 30.
“Part of it was just how sudden it was,” he began. “She was living a great life and she was having fun and then she got checked into the hospital, she was seen to be stable, and then a couple of days later it did that so you know, one, I think about all the things that we’ve done since then. She would have been a great aunt to her nieces and nephews. I would have liked for them to have been able to get to know her. She obviously would have done a lot of great things with her life. She would have potentially involved in some of the things that we’ve been doing.
“But what it shows you is, don’t take anything for granted. You just never know what’s going to happen, and so if there’s ever a time when you feel that you need to do something. You know, don’t just sit back on the sidelines. You go in and you do because you never know what chances you’re going to have in the future, so don’t take it for granted. Tell the people close to you that you love them and just try to live your best life every single day, and understand that ultimately every day is a gift from God.”
Minutes after DeSantis’ one hour town hall concluded, CNN then broadcast a town hall meeting with Haley. The two Republicans have been exchanging bitter exchanges for weeks as her poll numbers have grown and DeSantis’ have not.
DeSantis barely mentioned Haley in his town hall, though at one point he accused her of running “on her donors’ issues.” He also took a humorous jab at her by entering the stage and handing Collins a basketball jersey of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball star Caitlin Clark, whose name Haley mixed up with Collins earlier this week.
DeSantis and Haley will debate each other in the next GOP presidential debate next Wednesday night at 9 p.m. on CNN. Once again, Trump won’t participate. Instead, he’ll have his own town hall meeting at that same time on Fox News.
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