DeSantis and Trump aren’t fighting yet, but it makes sense that they are eyeing one another with concern.
DeSantis and Trump aren’t fighting yet, but it makes sense that they are eyeing one another with concern.
N ational-politics reporters and pundits have been busy lately trying to incite a fight between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. The narrative of conflict is overhyped, but it also reflects underlying tensions that will eventually break out into the open.
For now, officially, there is no feud. DeSantis is wise enough to want no such thing and has said so publicly. He has his own 2022 reelection bid to secure before he turns to national matters, and a breach with Trump would dent his ability to roll up a convincing up-and-down-the-ticket victory. Even if DeSantis is contemplating a frontal assault on Mount Trump, there is no reason for him to begin the ascent until after the midterms.
Trump has his own incentives to avoid a public spat for now. He, too, would like to claim credit for 2022 victories, which are more easily earned with a united front. While Trump has not always put party interests above his own, he understands that he is more powerful when elected Republicans see him as helping the team. In 2021, he gave Glenn Youngkin only as much support as Youngkin’s campaign was willing to accept; Trump did not follow through on a rumored in-person rally in Virginia just before the election. More broadly, Trump’s power in the party depends on fear of crossing him, and that fear would dissipate in a hurry if he were crossed successfully by a figure as prominent as DeSantis. As legal assaults mount against the former president, Trump is not yet ready to risk that.
Still, the tensions between the two camps — both the leaders and their supporters — are unmistakable. They flow logically from their respective places in national Republican politics. The thinly veiled lines of attack they have been testing against each other are unlikely to have been accidental. At some point, there must be a test of strength to see whether the future control of the party belongs to the 43-year-old Florida governor or the 75-year-old former president. The primal reality of political parties will reassert itself: There can only be one leader.
The Early Warning Shots
The opening shots came, as Michael Brendan Dougherty has recounted, when Trump went after unnamed “gutless” politicians who refused to disclose their vaccine status in interviews. This was broadly taken as an attack on DeSantis, who publicly disclosed getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine last April, as part of his vigorous advocacy of the vaccine in Florida, but who has refused to say whether he has received a booster. The latter reticence is part of a broader pattern of DeSantis’s siding with the rights of the unvaccinated to resist various mandates. It has been a careful high-wire act on the part of DeSantis to keep Florida highly vaccinated — its vaccination rates remain the best of any state in its region — while also winning the favor of unvaccinated voters who appreciate his staunch opposition to mandates.
Trump, despite his natural, preexisting affinity for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, quite rightly regards the Covid vaccines as one of the greatest accomplishments of his presidency. It is a comfortable posture for him to criticize Republicans he sees as disrespecting one of the keystones of his presidential legacy. But that has also created space for DeSantis to get to Trump’s right with the populist wing of the party on vaccines.
DeSantis then went on the Ruthless podcast with Josh Holmes, Twitter persona Comfortably Smug, and Mike Duncan, recorded before a live audience in Florida. DeSantis argued that he had pushed back against early federal pressure for more lockdowns and that he would have pushed even harder, knowing what he knows now. That framed him as taking another position — in addition to his stance on vaccine mandates — that placed him to the right of Trump on Covid issues.
This was interpreted in some quarters as a deliberate shot back across Trump’s bow. Maybe it was, to send a signal. But DeSantis was also very explicit earlier in the same podcast, when asked about media reports of conflict between himself and Trump, in framing it as a malicious creation of corporate media: “Don’t take the bait. . . . We need everybody united for a big red wave in 2022.” The crowd roared at his refusal to open a public quarrel with Trump. It did not have a similar reaction to his reflections on the earlier period.
Fuming at Mar-a-Lago?
That should be the end of it, for now — unless Trump fails to control his emotions. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin of the New York Times entered the fray with a big piece titled “Who Is King of Florida?” summarizing themes that Haberman has been pushing on Twitter:
For months, former President Donald J. Trump has been grumbling quietly to friends and visitors to his Palm Beach mansion about [DeSantis, who] has conspicuously refrained from saying he would stand aside if Mr. Trump runs for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. “The magic words,” Trump has said to several associates and advisers . . .
[DeSantis] has told friends he believes Mr. Trump’s expectation that he bend the knee is asking too much. . . . “I wonder why the guy won’t say he won’t run against me,” Mr. Trump has said to several associates and advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Reader beware: Haberman has long been the most prominent practitioner of the Trump-psychology beat, in which a writer compiles a story entirely from unnamed sources about what Trump is saying, how he is acting, and what seems to be on his mind. Stories of that nature are impossible to verify, and even if the writer really has sources that solid, the sources themselves may have issues of credibility, or the game of telephone from Trump to reporters such as Haberman may end up distorting what actually happened.
That said, there is little question that Haberman does have some good sources and that Trump is prone to be as unfiltered in private as he is in public. In at least one instance last summer, National Review confirmed with its own rock-solid sourcing that Trump was telling people some of the things Haberman was reporting. So it would be just as imprudent to hand-wave away everything she reports, discrediting it as “fake news,” as it would be to blindly trust anonymous-source reporting from a hostile newspaper.
In other words: We don’t know whether Trump is seething at DeSantis for failing to defer to him. It’s plausible. It’s likely, even. But we’ll have to await Trump’s actions.
A Game of Chicken
Much of the potential presidential showdown is about timing, and that is where the game-of-chicken aspect of this comes in. Trump can’t sit out 2024 and then run again in his 80s, after somebody else has supplanted him as the symbol of the party. If he wants to run again, it’s now or never. Haberman argues — plausibly, but again, from the perspective of the informed reader, without visible evidence — that Trump is likelier to run because of the various civil and criminal lawsuits and investigations against him (the New York attorney general looking into the Trump Organization, the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney probing Trump’s call to pressure Brad Raffensperger, the January 6 congressional committee). In this telling, it is the legal “Resistance” that is trying to egg Trump into running again. Whether that drives him to run more than it saddles him with harmful baggage is debatable.
The counterargument, for Trump, is that losing another general election would be much harder to spin as another robbery and that losing a Republican primary would be crushing. Also, Trump never really seemed to enjoy carrying out the duties of the presidency, as opposed to basking in the glow of the office. If Trump declined to run in 2024 and backed the winner of the Republican primary, he would no longer be the center of attention, but he would also ascend to a status where he could no longer be touched. He could hold all the campaign rallies he wanted, and then (as in the past), if his candidate lost, he could just blame the candidate. If DeSantis enters the 2024 primary and Trump supports him, it would be an almost unstoppable combination, and one that would stand a strong chance of winning back the White House (based on how the political environment looks today) .
For DeSantis, his relative youth and the fate of nearly everyone else in the party who has attempted a direct, open confrontation with Trump would seem to argue for waiting. But presidential politics is all about exploiting the right moment. Barack Obama could have waited out Hillary Clinton in 2008. Bill Clinton could have waited out George H. W. Bush in 1992. Chris Christie shouldn’t have waited in 2012, when he fit the mood of the party and the nation, and before he torched his own brand. Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t have waited in 2016, when there was a populist mood in both parties and an opening that Bernie Sanders exploited but couldn’t quite complete. Mario Cuomo shouldn’t have waited in 1992 and watched his moment expire. (Sometimes, the moment doesn’t align: Nikki Haley was ideally positioned in 2018 but has been eclipsed since then.) It seems unlikely that a moment demanding Ron DeSantis will last forever.
The Path around Trump
Could Trump actually be beaten in a head-to-head primary? In ideological and practical terms, the space would seem to exist, and it is not just limited to Covid issues. A case can be made on a number of fronts (as Rich Lowry has laid out) that Trump may have been the man to start some important fights, but he’s not the man to finish them, and DeSantis is. In that regard, the ability of DeSantis to roll up political and policy accomplishments in Florida, where he has firm control of state government, is a major asset that Trump now lacks.
Josh Barro notes that Trump has tried to immunize himself against the “you’re a loser who lost the last election” attack by persuading people that he was robbed, and he asks why a Republican challenger couldn’t turn “I was robbed” against him:
There’s one thing I find odd about Trump’s ability to use election-theft lies to lock down the Republican base: What if the lies were true? Don’t they still make Trump look like an incompetent failure? And doesn’t that provide an opening for a challenger like DeSantis?
Trump’s story about 2020, such as it is, is that he won by a “landslide” but a bipartisan cadre of election officials stole the race from him. He complained a lot about election rule changes like expanded mail-in voting but didn’t stop them. He found shitty lawyers who filed idiotically argued lawsuits too late to matter. He didn’t get the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security to do anything about the alleged conspiracy against him. And people he himself hired didn’t do the things he asked of them to “stop the steal,” going all the way up to Mike Pence.
If you take Trump at his word, it’s not simply that the election was stolen — it’s that the election was stolen and he failed at every turn to stop it, even as he held the powers of the presidency. It’s that all sorts of people he entrusted with power betrayed him and he let them all get away with it. And as a result, Republicans lost control of the government. How on earth is that a message that says “nominate me again”?
DeSantis is actually well positioned to make that argument — and to do so without even diving into Trump’s stolen-election fantasies. He could easily deliver a message something like this:
All I can say is, we had a free and fair election in Florida, we didn’t let the Democrats cheat, and Trump won it fair and square. We were just about done counting votes well before the leads in other states started changing late at night. Florida elections didn’t work by accident; we got out in front and kept them secure. And we passed more election laws in 2021 to prevent anything like that from happening here.
Of course, getting around Trump is not just about policy or even mood; there is still the hold of Trump’s celebrity and persona.
The Defectors
Can people be pried away from Trump? One early warning sign of the erosion of Trump’s position in the party has been the rising tide of Trump criticism, and in some cases open defection to DeSantis, from some of the quarters of the right-wing commentariat that were once the friendliest to Trump and his ethos. Partly this is temperamental and opportunistic; people who make their living being against the party establishment or build their self-identity around being outsiders are inevitably going to tire of defending the party’s leader for years on end. Partly it is genuine disillusionment with the idea that accomplishing the goals of “Trumpism,” however defined, must always be subordinated to the personal whims and interests of Donald J. Trump.
Either way, consider the cracks in the foundation among people who were previously combative MAGA loyalists, some of whom have turned on Trump or prefer DeSantis, others of whom are keeping their options open:
- Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust, tells Haberman and Martin: “Trump is done. You guys should stop obsessing over him.” Coulter can be fickle in her favorites, and she soured on Trump a while ago, but she was an early Trump advocate, and a quarter-century into her career, she has instincts for where her audience is headed.
- David Reaboi, a Claremont Institute fellow and podcast host who lives in Florida, recently met with DeSantis and wrote a Newsweek column on how “Ron DeSantis Welcomes You to Florida, America’s New Texas.” A sample: “Troublingly for Trump loyalists in Mar-a-Lago, the enthusiasm with which Republicans across the country greet a new statement or memorable, combative press conference from DeSantis indicates that the governor has filled the void in what was previously seen as the party of Donald Trump. DeSantis has taken the reins with creative, aggressive policy solutions to many of the issues left unaddressed over the four years of the Trump administration. The governor’s tangible solutions to hot-button issues . . . stand in stark contrast to the former president’s notable inability to do more than simply talk about them.”
- Kurt Schlichter of Townhall, in a piece titled “Trump v. DeSantis: Advantage, DeSantis”: “Trump, if he runs, is not a shoo-in. . . . My gut is again telling me that 75-year-old Donald Trump will not run in 2024. . . . This is not about gratitude. It is about what he did for us lately. Is it possible that the support for Trump ’24 is a mile wide and an inch deep?” Noting the shift from Trump to DeSantis among his Twitter supporters (“Two-thirds now are looking elsewhere”), Schlichter concluded, “This is not about Trump, nor about gratitude. It’s about winning.”
- Laura Ingraham: “I’m not saying I’m there for him yet.”
- Mike Cernovich: “DeSantis is who Trump pretended to be.” More: “Trump moved to Florida to live under Governor DeSantis. May the entire country be as fortunate as Trump, and have this same option in 2024.”
- Candace Owens has criticized Trump as being “old” and too disengaged with Internet sources to be sufficiently critical of the Covid vaccine, while praising DeSantis for his anti-mandates stance.
Another sign of how the world has moved on from Trump to DeSantis as the chief Republican lightning rod is the growing and predictable chorus from progressives of “actually, DeSantis is worse than Trump” articles and TV segments, including entries from Samantha Bee, MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah, and New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait. Paul Waldman of the Washington Post hyperventilates that “in Florida, Ron DeSantis is creating a paradise of authoritarianism.”
The Diehards
By contrast, the people lining up to try to enforce a party line for Trump against DeSantis are, conspicuously, the Trump establishment — the people who have personal connections to Trump, or who depend on Trump’s favor to make money or get out of legal jeopardy. Examples:
- Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff: DeSantis is “smart enough to know that this is the party of Trump. This will continue to be.” Meadows said it “won’t be Ron DeSantis challenging him” if he does.
- Roger Stone threatened in November 2021 that he would launch a third-party spoiler run against DeSantis as Florida governor this fall if he doesn’t pledge to not run against Trump. More recently, he tore into DeSantis, endorsing an Axios report that Trump had said the governor “has no personal charisma and has a dull personality,” to which Stone added, “Yale Harvard fat boy can’t get out of his own way. Not smart. Not honest and not going to be president.” For good measure, Stone — a notorious dirty trickster with a Richard Nixon tattoo on his back — tried to imply that DeSantis had an affair with a famously pro-Trump reporter. Stone, of course, is a convicted felon who was pardoned by Trump.
Pundits who have bet their careers on Trump’s permanent dominance of the GOP are, of course, in the same camp, arguing that Trump is invulnerable to a DeSantis challenge,and won’t face one. Charlie Sykes of the Bulwark: “DeSantis (1) won’t challenge Trump if he runs, and (2) has zero chance of beating him in a GOP primary.” Amanda Carpenter of the Bulwark: “DeSantis is afraid to say whether he got the booster and we are supposed to think he is gonna find the nerve to take on Trump? Consider me skeptical.” Jonathan Last of the Bulwark:
Ron DeSantis Is Going to Get Trump Trucked. . . . Trump ran right over the GOP field in 2016 on matters of policy by beating them with attitude and affect. And he’ll do the same to DeSantis. . . . The only way to (theoretically) outflank Trump is on comportment . . .
The next leader of the Republican Party won’t be a politician who challenges Trump and unseats him. The Republican Party is a totalitarian state and in autocracies, you ascend to the throne by being loyal to the boss and positioning yourself to take over when he passes on. . . . Nobody has yet been able to thread that needle. And truth be told, I don’t think it’s possible . . .
If I had to bet $100, it would be that the heir to Trump will either be Don Jr. or an outside figure with their own media platform who coexisted with Trump yet never appeared as a political rival while Trump still walked among us.
The Polling
In opinion polling terms, it is still a long way to the 2022 midterms, let alone 2024. Republican voters continue to mostly circle the wagons around Trump when asked by pollsters, and with his universal name recognition, he leads any early candidate field by a wide margin. But there are cracks. Polling on whether Republicans — or voters as a whole — want Trump to run again or see themselves as supporters of Trump have been up and down, but show some potential erosion:
- January 2022 NBC poll: Fifty-six percent of Republicans describe themselves more as supporters of the Republican Party, whereas 36 percent describe themselves more as supporters of Trump. That’s the lowest “supporters of Trump” number since the poll started asking the question. Just before the 2020 election, 54 percent described themselves as supporters of Trump, and 38 percent as supporters of the party. The numbers were even in January 2021. This was the first time Trump-first supporters dropped below 40 percent.
- October 2021 Pew poll: Only 44 percent want Trump to run again; 22 percent want him to support a different candidate who shares his views; and 32 percent want him to go away. A November 2021, Marquette poll showed that 60 percent of Republicans want Trump to run again, and 40 percent do not. The key difference between the two polls is that the Marquette poll did not offer the middle option: instead of Trump, a different candidate offering the same policies. But even the Marquette number is down from two-thirds in a May 2021 Quinnipiac poll.
- On the other hand, October 2021 polls from Quinnipiac and Harvard/Harris both showed 77 or 78 percent of Republicans supporting another Trump run. A December 2021 poll from Morning Consult had 70 percent of Republicans wanting another Trump run.
- Among all voters, a January 2022 AP-NORC poll found that 27 percent want Trump to run again, while 73 percent do not; for Joe Biden, the numbers are 28 percent yes, 70 percent no. The same figures in the Marquette poll were 28 percent yes, 71 percent no among all voters, 26 percent yes, 73 percent no among independents. The October Quinnipiac poll had 35 percent — overall and among independents supporting another Trump run, and 58 percent opposed. Harvard/Harris had 47 percent overall supporting another Trump run (40 percent among independents), and 53 percent opposed. Trump’s overall favorability with the public remains even lower than Joe Biden’s.
- September 2021 CNN poll: Sixty-three percent of Republicans still want Trump as the leader of the party, but only a narrow majority — 51 percent to 49 percent — think that the party would stand a better chance of victory with Trump than with a different candidate.
Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report notes signs from focus groups of softening support: “GOP strategists I’ve spoken with say they are hearing the same level of hesitancy in focus groups of Republican voters that they are conducting. These voters aren’t against Trump, but they are open to the idea of a fresh face, one without all the drama and baggage that Trump will bring to the table.”
Henry Olsen at the Washington Post points as well to the declining power of Trump’s endorsements, although even during his presidency, the candidates he supported did not always win their primaries.
All of which is a way of saying that Trump — with his advanced age, his declining public profile, his 2020 defeat, and his continuing baggage — may well be more vulnerable than he looks to a fresh face who can offer a continuation of what Trump started but without everything revolving around Trump himself. Trump’s slow fade might accelerate if he is pushed.
Fortune favors the bold, and DeSantis has gotten where he is by being bold. There is no guarantee that DeSantis would choose a confrontation with Trump, or that he would win — but you would be a fool to write him off.