Ron DeSantis should have waited to do this foreign trip after formally announcing his run for presidency.
There’s been a lot of unnecessary bed-wetting and hand-wringing among Ron DeSantis supporters the past few months as he has absorbed abuse from Donald Trump without fully responding in kind. Naturally, the instinct to panic has been gleefully fed by the alliance of Trump with Democrats and liberal and progressive media eager to stop DeSantis before he gets off the launch pad. DeSantis has gotten this far because he has good instincts and knows how to stick to a plan, and that’s what he’s doing.
That doesn’t mean all of his decisions are correct, and I think the timing of his current foreign trip is a mistake. He should have waited to do this after formally announcing. The standard answer for why DeSantis hasn’t announced yet is that he needs to focus on the spring legislative session (including the need to get the legislature to repeal the state law that would require him to resign as governor if he announced as a candidate). He can more easily sustain that argument while making quick side trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina than during an extended trip abroad, even one nominally billed as a Florida trade mission.
He would also be in a stronger rhetorical position, publicly and in private meetings with foreign dignitaries, if he is doing so as an open candidate, rather than having to constantly dodge questions with “I’m not a candidate.” It’s not a question he’s comfortable answering; we saw last fall that demurring on his presidential ambitions was the one question that tripped him up in debating Charlie Crist:
"I'm not a candidate, so we'll see if and when that changes," Gov. DeSantis, who is in Japan right now, says when asked about polls that show him falling behind Trump. pic.twitter.com/nDVeyBoVHN
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 24, 2023
One of my general rules of politics is that you should minimize the number of situations in which it is necessary to pretend that you’re doing something other than what you’re actually doing. One reason why Trump is seen as genuine and authentic in spite of being a notorious and brazen liar about all manner of topics is that he has no patience for the polite fictions and conventions of politics; if Trump was on this trip, he’d just have ignored the law and come out openly as a candidate. DeSantis should have waited.