Slinging Pudding and Evading Responsibility

Republican primary voters with weak stomachs are advised to avoid the latest assault on Florida governor Ron DeSantis via a Trump-aligned super PAC. They’re unlikely to forget their encounter with a 30-second spot titled “Pudding Fingers.”

The advertisement vaults off the mid-March revelation that DeSantis was once compelled for want of utensils on a private flight between Washington, D.C., and Tallahassee to tuck into a cup of chocolate pudding using three fingers — a detail that became late-night comedy fodder for the better part of a week. The anti-DeSantis spot produced by Make America Great Again Inc. features a faceless actor shoveling pudding into his face, with varying degrees of success, in such a way as to make even those with the most robust constitutions feel a little woozy.

At the risk of overanalyzing the ad’s aesthetics, one could say that if Republican voters subconsciously internalize an association between DeSantis and nausea, this might one day be regarded as an effective campaign ad.

That assumes, however, that these voters do not critically listen to the substance of the ad. The MAGA Inc. spot does not dwell on DeSantis’s allegedly unrefined table manners but rather on the fact that the longtime Republican lawmaker once evinced support for longtime Republican positions: specifically, the urgent and undeniable national imperative for reforming America’s unfunded entitlement programs before they collapse.

“DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements like cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security, even raising the retirement age,” the ad’s narrator intones. The spot concludes by calling on voters to demand that DeSantis “keep his pudding fingers off our money.”

The message about entitlements may be compelling even to voters within the Republican electorate. Democrats have repeatedly proven that trading willfully on voters’ ignorance about the parlous state of America’s unfunded liabilities is a tactic that works.

Republican voters may not be used to hearing boilerplate Democratic language articulated by an organization ostensibly allied with a Republican presidential campaign. But they soon will be. Over the weekend, a super PAC aligned with DeSantis’s nascent campaign responded to the pro-Trump group’s attack on the Florida governor by mounting the same accusation against Trump.

The 30-second counterattack produced by the pro-DeSantis PAC Never Back Down,  ironically titled “Fight Democrats, Not Republicans,” turns the tables on Trump by accusing him of secretly wanting to reform America’s imperiled entitlement programs.

“Trump’s stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook,” the ad begins auspiciously enough. But this pro-DeSantis spot soon deploys the moves from that very same playbook. “We’re not going to mess with Social Security,” the ad features DeSantis saying. By contrast, it notes that Donald Trump had previously told a reporter that, “at some point,” entitlements will be something to “look at.”

That pusillanimously vague language is meant to convey that Trump, too, can read the dire predictions produced by the trustees of America’s entitlement programs. But that’s not the ad’s argument. The ad argues that it’s a “lie” to suggest DeSantis has any intention of reforming Social Security ahead of an imminent insolvency crisis.

We’re left to conclude that neither of the two most competitive Republican presidential aspirants have any intention of tackling America’s foremost debt drivers, and that is meant to be a comfort to America’s voters. It is not.

In January, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Social Security will experience shortfalls even earlier than the program’s trustees formerly predicted. The program’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance trust funds will hit a wall in 2032 rather than 2035. That makes sense. Last year, in response to surging inflation rates, Social Security recipients saw a staggering 8.7 percent increase in their cost-of-living-adjusted disbursements — a boost rivaled only by the prior year’s 5.9 percent increase.

As a result of these increases, the earnings subject to the Social Security tax increased by 9 percent. “So,” Forbes reported last year, “the maximum Social Security tax per worker will be rising $1,637 from $18,228 to $19,865—with $9932.50 of that taken directly out of an employee’s paycheck, up from $9,114 this year.” This is automatic, not discretionary. So, too, will be the 20 percent cut in benefits millions of Social Security recipients will experience if the program is left to careen over a cliff.

All this is happening. It may be politically prudent to pretend it isn’t and to demagogue the prospect of reforms to a program headed toward disaster, but it’s hardly courageous. Some day soon, an American president will either seek to reform these programs or preside over their diminution. Both involve political risks, but only one offers the tantalizing prospect of political rewards, too.

Those rewards will be available only to the president who secures a popular mandate for reform. That mandate will be awarded only to the politician who treats voters like adults. If the pudding-flinging stage of the 2024 GOP primary is any indication, that’s a remote prospect.