Former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis traded punches Thursday over the advantages of experience in office versus the ability to serve multiple terms.
Speaking to a group of voters in Iowa, the former president said his second term in office would start much faster than his first, and that he could reverse the Biden administration’s impact on the country in six months.
“It will be a beautiful thing to watch. It’s going to happen very quickly,” said Trump. “And I’m very experienced now. It’s not like I’m going in saying ‘This is a nice office. Is this the Oval Office?’ It takes you about a year to sort of say, ‘Can you believe this? This is the Oval Office.’ I won’t have to say that.”
Trump contrasted his experience with one of DeSantis’ attacks against the former president: that DeSantis, if elected, will have the ability to run for another term.
“I’ve been watching DeSanctus go out and say ‘I’ve got eight years. It’s going to be eight years.’ Let me tell you something, right there you should vote against him,” Trump said, referring to the Florida governor with one of Trump’s trademark nicknames. “It’ll take me six months to have it totally the way it was. We’ll have it fast. It’s drilling, it’s the wall, and it’s getting criminals out of our country that have been allowed to come in so freely.”
A reporter brought Trump’s promise to make the U.S. “the way it was” in six months to DeSantis, who was campaigning about 1,200 miles away in New Hampshire. “Why didn’t he do it his first four years?” DeSantis quipped.
.@GovRonDeSantis responds to my question about former President Trump saying he’d fix the U.S. in six months after DeSantis previously said he’d need two terms to turn the country around.
DeSantis: “Why didn’t he do it in his first four years?” pic.twitter.com/7Tu39HFuCr
— Gabe Gutierrez (@gabegutierrez) June 1, 2023
In previous remarks, DeSantis has said the fact Trump can only serve four more years will undermine Republican governance in the future. Getting a president elected of the same party as the incumbent is difficult, and has not been done since George H. W. Bush took over from Ronald Reagan after the 1988 election.
Trump has dismissed the criticism, saying that a Republican get elected after his second term and serve eight more years in office after him.