I would love to hear about how a DeSantis Administration would persuade Egypt and Saudi Arabia to accept Palestinian refugees.
DeSantis asks a fair question about how Haley would pay for aid to Ukraine, and instead of giving a substantive answer, she just attacks DeSantis for blowing through lots of campaign money. That perhaps is an indictment of DeSantis, but does not explain what she would cut in the budget to pay for Ukraine aid.
DeSantis teed Halely up with a cheap shot over her service in the United Nations – a service that was marked by admirable hostility toward that institution’s anti-American bias and its corrupted agencies, like the United Nations Council on Human Rights. But Haley passed on it in favor of attacking DeSantis for misallocating his campaign’s resources. A missed opportunity.
Haley was correct in the foreign aid exchange on the merits. DeSantis spanked her rhetorically, however, in a way that was less than fair but effective nonetheless.
DeSantis and Haley have both used the attacks I said we should expect from the candidates from this afternoon's Corner post.
Will either candidate talk about ongoing attacks on commercial shipping and U.S. sailors in the Red Sea?
Haley: “If Russia wins, China wins.” She’s right. And her clarity on this point has been more successful than DeSantis’s effort to find a middle ground, even if DeSantis’s position is (in the abstract) closer to that of the median Republican voter.
There’s a lesson there about the difference between leadership and following the voters. DeSantis is often good at the former, but not on this issue.
Haley says DeSantis supported aid to Ukraine under Obama. Of course, that was aid at a vastly smaller scale. And DeSantis isn’t proposing cutting Ukraine off without a penny.
The reality is this: as badly as these candidates need to beat one another, the most important question of all in the Iowa caucus is how much of the electorate Trump gets.
(There’s no feasible way to deport 10 million+ people, sorry guys.)