Covid, Russia and crime: GOP presidential hopefuls take swipes at ...

That’s starting to change.Over the past few weeks, three would-be presidential candidates who hail from the conservative wing of the Republican Party — Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — have prodded at or even outright criticized the former president’s record. During a high-profile speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a longtime platform for ambitious Republicans, Cotton called the bipartisan legislation “the worst mistake” of Trump’s tenure.“No piece of legislation did more to harm our status as the party of public safety than the First Step Act,” said Cotton, noting that he had “led the fight” against the bill before its passage in 2018.“What I predicted then has come true many times over: Criminals released from prison under the First Step Act have committed many more heinous crimes,” Cotton added. During a closed-door speech before a Republican National Committee donor conference in New Orleans earlier this month, he declared that “elections are about the future” and that “we cannot win by fighting yesterday’s battles or by re-litigating the past.”Turning to Russia, the former vice president contended there was “no room in this party for apologists for Putin” — another not-so-veiled jab at Trump, who only days earlier had called the Russian leader a “genius.”Pence followed up the next week by venturing to the Poland-Ukraine border to meet with Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of their homeland — a move that senior Republicans again viewed as an implicit contrast with, and swipe against, Trump.Republican strategist Scott Jennings, who served as a top political adviser to former President George W. The day after Pence addressed the RNC donor conference, Trump delivered his own speech at the event where he rebutted his former vice president.“Somebody called me a ‘Putin apologist’ the other day,” Trump said, before going on to dispute the criticism.