In his excellent column today, “Trump 2024 Doesn’t Have a Jeb,” Rich notes that Jeb Bush “served, largely through circumstances beyond his control, as the ideal opponent for Trump in 2016.” But “there’s no Trump rival on the horizon in 2024 so neatly tailored to Trump’s purposes, in part because Trump-catalyzed changes in the party now make a Jeb Bush–type figure impossible. . . . No one comes close to fitting this bill this time around. Ron DeSantis, who projects as Trump’s main threat in the very early going, is different on all counts.” He continues:
All this said, it’s important to remember that if Bush was Trump’s favorite target — and the one who put the strengths of Trump’s campaign in starkest relief — he wasn’t the only one. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio ultimately got run over, too.
It’s true that Bush never figured out how to deal with Trump’s insults and full-spectrum animosity, but neither did anyone else.
That’s a condition that still may obtain. It’s easy — and the right play — for DeSantis to brush off Trump’s attacks for now. Yet the time for side-stepping will end eventually, and DeSantis might find it harder than he anticipates to solve the dilemma of responding to Trump that Bush faced in 2016.
This is something I’ve been wrestling with. Due to his sharp political instincts, DeSantis has positioned himself extremely well vis-à-vis Trump going into a likely 2024 matchup. But everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face — and face punches are what Trump doled out in healthy servings in the 2016 primary. While Trump may trail DeSantis in focus and competence, he beats him in raw charisma. DeSantis would be a good president because he’s an extremely competent executive and a shrewd political operator, and he has a proven ability to deliver on conservative priorities, even (or especially!) over the objections of powerful left-wing institutions. He does not have the sort of world-historical stump energy that Trump has. To be fair, no one does.
I’m sure this isn’t news to DeSantis. He is almost certainly aware of this weakness, and insofar as he’s gaming out a future debate with Trump, it’s surely something he’s planning for. The advantage that he — or anyone hoping to challenge Trump in the 2024 primary, for that matter — has is that Trump no longer enjoys the element of surprise. By the time Republican elites figured out that Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop, take-no-prisoners style was working in 2016, it was too late to organize a counterattack. That won’t be an issue in 2024.
Thus far, DeSantis’s initial back-and-forths with Trump have appeared to be successful, but they’ve been mediated via third parties. Even years of preparation might not give DeSantis an edge over Trump on the debate stage. Charisma can be learned, but only to an extent. The political-science research, with a number of caveats, tends to show that televised presidential debates have surprisingly little effect on the general election, but they can sway significant numbers of voters in the primary. With that being said, the available data also tend to show that debates are the most consequential in situations where voters don’t already know much about the candidates — not a significant issue for either Trump or DeSantis. I don’t think DeSantis has to beat Trump outright in the debates to clinch the nomination. But I do think he has to avoid a viral total-meltdown moment, like the murder-suicide orchestrated by Chris Christie against Marco Rubio in 2016. Those are the kinds of moments that can sink an otherwise promising candidate.