Upon the news reports Thursday that Donald Trump had been indicted by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Ron DeSantis announced on Twitter that he would not cooperate in extraditing Trump from Florida:
The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American. The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent. Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.
The optimistic case for DeSantis as a path to a more successful and less dysfunctional Republican future is that he offers something like a philosophically coherent synthesis of Reaganism with Trumpism or the post-Trump New Right — not just giving both Reaganites and Trumpists enough to keep them in an uneasy coalition together, but actually providing a framework for doing so that makes some level of sense. (Those who remember “compassionate conservatism” know that efforts to rebrand and rethink conservatism have not always been sustainable even when they enjoyed a period of electoral success.)
But that’s the longer term. It’s been clear for a while that DeSantis also calculates that he will from time to time have to offer sorts of pandering to the MAGA base that are in no sense defensible as a matter of principle, but are in most cases harmless enough that non-MAGA voters who are weary of Trump are willing to swallow it just to be rid of him. Much as I dislike this sort of thing, I tend to agree with the underlying electoral calculation. Events will prove whether DeSantis is right about this.
This is another example. It’s transparent grandstanding, but it was always likely to be of an entirely symbolic nature. In light of the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution, governors have very limited tools to prevent their citizens from being extradited to other states within the American legal system, and at most can throw enough sand in the gears to slow things down. If governors started doing this sort of thing routinely, the American system would be in a bad place in a hurry; then again, if this only happened when former presidents were indicted while running again for the job, it would not be a common occurrence.
But here’s the devious part: In the improbable event that Trump took DeSantis up on his offer to fight extradition and drag things out, Trump would be walking into an enormous trap. He would effectively be confined to Florida, unable to crisscross the country holding campaign rallies. Even if he could travel directly to and from other states whose governors agreed to do the same, it is far from certain that Iowa’s Kim Reynolds would follow suit (she has blasted the indictment as a “sham” but said nothing in her statement about extradition) and highly unlikely that New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu would do so. It would be a kind of political house arrest, and DeSantis would be the direct beneficiary. It would also make Trump look like a crook unwilling to face the music.
Fortunately for those of us who would prefer to avoid an interstate constitutional crisis, Trump may be a fool, but he does not appear to be that big a fool, as DeSantis surely anticipated. He is reportedly going to appear for arraignment Tuesday in Manhattan, which will moot the extradition discussion.