The Ron DeSantis War Room recently posted an anti-LGBTQ video that attacked Trump for pro-LGBTQ statements and was criticized as homophobic by some Republican groups, but the tactic DeSantis backers are using comes straight from Trump himself, according to a report from the New York Times on Saturday.
DeSantis in the past has said he doesn't care about people's sexuality and that Republicans should stay out of the "bathroom wars," yet today the governor is harnessing anger around those issues to be used in his bid for the Republican nomination, according to Nicholas Nehamas and Maggie Haberman of the Times.
"Earlier in his career, as a congressman, Mr. DeSantis did not seem consumed by combating the L.G.B.T.Q. community. At the time, he privately told a counterpart he didn’t care about people’s sexuality," they wrote. "And when he first ran for governor five years ago, Mr. DeSantis suggested he would take a more moderate approach on some L.G.B.T.Q. rights issues, saying that Republicans needed to move beyond debating which bathrooms transgender people should use. 'Getting into bathroom wars, I don’t think that’s a good use of our time,' he said at a Republican candidate forum in 2018."
They added:
"But in this campaign for the Republican nomination, Mr. DeSantis has sought to highlight — and expand — his ultraconservative credentials in an effort to position himself to the right of his chief rival."
In his bid to run to the right of Trump, it appears as though DeSantis is using a tactic known to his opponent: triggering the liberals.
"Mr. DeSantis has frequently cast himself as a lightning rod for unfair criticism by liberals and has used such attacks to rally support from his political base. The video, compiled by another Twitter user, seemed intended, in part, to attract more liberal outrage at a time when he is struggling to gain traction in polls against Mr. Trump," Nehamas and Haberman wrote Saturday. "It was the type of move — devised to provoke a reaction — that Mr. Trump often deployed from his Twitter account during the 2016 campaign."
The article continues:
"The video shared by the DeSantis campaign reflects a race to the right on a number of issues in the primary. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has signed bills restricting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, punishing businesses that admit minors to 'adult live performances' such as drag shows and making it a misdemeanor trespassing offense for people to use bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond to their sex at birth."
