Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis delivered an economic speech Monday, an event understandably overshadowed by the latest indictment of former president Donald Trump. The speech was a revealing blend of Trumpian and orthodox Republican policies, and DeSantis laid out where he might diverge from both were he to be president.
DeSantis on the economy: Both Trumpian and orthodox conservative
The Florida governor’s economic vision as he runs for president is a mixture of traditional Republican policies and Trumpian us-vs.-them critiques
Analysis by Dan Balz
The speech began with a dark description of the state of the country. America, DeSantis said, is in decline — militarily, culturally and economically. He found many sources to blame. China for one, immigrants another, the elite a third — the latter a group he attacked multiple times as the root cause. The economic speech was a continuation of the overall tone of his presidential campaign.
The populist, us-vs.-them rhetoric reflected Trump’s influence on the Republican Party. Trump likes to pick fights and personalize critiques. He shifts the terms of the political conversation and of GOP policies. DeSantis has adopted this approach as his own as he competes against Trump for the Republican nomination.
The governor attacked a “failed ruling class,” which he said has profited at the expense of the country as a whole and the middle class specifically. “We have to defeat those individuals and institutions that have caused our economic malaise,” he said. “We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations in Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans.”
At another point, he said, “The goal of our Declaration of Independence is simple. We the American people win, they lose.”
DeSantis attacked the elite from multiple directions, going after attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos as well as Beltway residents. He noted that many of the wealthiest counties in the country are those surrounding the nation’s capital. “They’re not producing anything of note other than a lot of debt and a lot of hot air,” he said.
His critiques of the income and wealth gap would find favor with some of those on the left, as when he pointed out that “the bottom half of households have less wealth than they did in 1989 [while] the top 10 percent have added $29 trillion in wealth” and suggested that policies favored by the elite have contributed to that.
But DeSantis added his own contemporary spin on this, arguing that economic lockdowns during the pandemic enlarged the gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom half. “The covid lockdowns and the associated policies represented the largest transfer of wealth from working people, small businesses to large corporations, like Apple and Amazon and Facebook, that we’ve ever seen in the modern history of our country,” he said.
In broad strokes, Trumpian economics is antiglobalist, anti-elite and “America First.” It is inward looking, suspicious of other nations, which the former president has long believed have taken advantage of the United States. DeSantis adopts some of the same views, particularly when focusing on China. “The Chinese Communist Party continues to eat this country’s lunch every single day,” he said.
Talking tough about China is popular across party lines these days. Trump began the shift in tone and policy when it was becoming clearer that China was turning more politically autocratic and hostile despite its integration into the world economy. Tariffs were a principal Trump weapon. President Biden has not truly reversed course during his time in office amid worsening U.S.-China relations, which his administration is trying now to ease.
In terms of China policy, DeSantis has joined with other Republican presidential candidates in calling for far more adversarial approaches on issues such as trade, intellectual property and human rights. Whether DeSantis would risk making good on his pledge to revoke China’s permanent normal trade relations status, in light of the disruptive consequences that would come with it, is a different question.
The Trumpian influences on DeSantis and the Republican Party are clear. But then there’s basic Republican economic policy. Beyond the sharp rhetoric about the elite and immigrants and China-bashing, large parts of DeSantis’s economic thinking reflect traditional party orthodoxy, what the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin called “meat and potatoes” solutions long enunciated by Republican candidates.
As outlined in the speech, these policies would include low taxes, a small regulatory state, controlling spending and bringing down the debt, cutting down the federal bureaucracy, improving the education system, and increasing oil and gas production. “There’s nothing in that that sounds unconventional in any way,” Holtz-Eakin said.
DeSantis’s speech left many unanswered questions. One is his call to control spending. He favors a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, although there’s little likelihood of that becoming reality, but has not outlined areas of the federal budget to cut. He said nothing in the speech about whether he would seek to restructure entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare, a key question about future federal spending. He has said previously that he would not touch Social Security benefits for current recipients but is open to exploring changes that would affect future generations. What does he have in mind?
Another area that needs more detail is his pledge to produce annual growth in gross domestic product of 3 percent, a target that has proved elusive to policymakers of both parties for most of the past three decades. Eight years ago, as he began his presidential campaign, former Florida Republican governor Jeb Bush promised 4 percent growth. Economists dismissed Bush’s goal as wildly optimistic on a sustained basis. DeSantis has set a lower target, but still one that could be difficult to achieve.
Where DeSantis appears to be moving beyond where Trump was as president is in his posture toward big tech, big corporations and the Federal Reserve. Here, he is genuinely hawkish, and in Florida, he has shown already his willingness to use the power of the state to affect corporate behavior.
He picked a fight with the Walt Disney Co. when a Disney executive criticized new Florida legislation that limits discussion of gender and identity issues in elementary schools. He cut the investment firm BlackRock out of managing about $2 billion of state money over ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) investment policies. As president, he said, “We’re going to end the politicization of the economy by kneecapping things like ESG.”
DeSantis has drawn criticism from others in his party for this kind of thinking. They see it as the antithesis of conservatism. In their view, the government should allow market forces to work. If a company’s policies are offensive, customers will decide not to buy its products. DeSantis wants to use the government to dictate what corporations should do.
He also has been vigorous in attacking the Federal Reserve. The Fed, he said, should not be “an economic central planner” or be “indulging in social justice.” Its job is to maintain stable prices “and it has departed from that with what it’s done over the last many years.” But a president’s power over the Fed is limited. DeSantis said he would appoint a Fed chair “who understands “the limited role that it has.”
He also fully rejects any role for the Fed in the development of a digital currency, which he describes as another attempt by the elite to gain power and influence. “Central bank digital currency is a wolf coming as a wolf,” he said. This is an issue of minimal importance to most Americans, one that it is safe to say few know about or understand. For DeSantis, it has become a passion.
At this stage of the campaign, there’s no reason to expect DeSantis to fill in all the details of his policies. There is time ahead for him to do that if he moves successfully forward in his campaign. But as an opening bid, the speech underscored how the Republican Party has evolved under Trump — and where DeSantis would push to accelerate those changes.