Skip to content

The Florida Cage-match

The NY Times has a juicy story about Trump’s growing animosity toward his mini-me, Ron DeSantis. I guess he’s feeling the heat:

For months, former President Donald J. Trump has been grumbling quietly to friends and visitors to his Palm Beach mansion about a rival Republican power center in another Florida mansion, some 400 miles to the north.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man Mr. Trump believes he put on the map, has been acting far less like an acolyte and more like a future competitor, Mr. Trump complains. With his stock rising fast in the party, the governor 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.

That long-stewing resentment burst into public view recently in a dispute over a seemingly unrelated topic: Covid policies. After Mr. DeSantis refused to reveal his full Covid vaccination history, the former president publicly acknowledged he had received a booster. Last week, he seemed to swipe at Mr. DeSantis by blasting as “gutless” politicians who dodge the question out of fear of blowback from vaccine skeptics.

Mr. DeSantis shot back on Friday, criticizing Mr. Trump’s early handling of the pandemic and saying he regretted not being more vocal in his complaints.

The back and forth exposed how far Republicans have shifted to the right on coronavirus politics. The doubts Mr. Trump amplified about public health expertise have only spiraled since he left office. Now his defense of the vaccines — even if often subdued and almost always with the caveat in the same breath that he opposes mandates — has put him uncharacteristically out of step with the hard-line elements of his party’s base and provided an opening for a rival.

But that it was Mr. DeSantis — a once-loyal member of the Trump court — wielding the knife made the tension about much more.

At its core, the dispute amounts to a stand-in for the broader challenge confronting Republicans at the outset of midterm elections. They are led by a defeated former president who demands total fealty, brooks no criticism and is determined to sniff out, and then snuff out, any threat to his control of the party.

That includes the 43-year-old DeSantis, who has told friends he believes Mr. Trump’s expectation that he bend the knee is asking too much. That refusal has set up a generational clash and a test of loyalty in the de facto capital of today’s G.O.P., one watched by Republicans elsewhere who’ve ridden to power on Mr. Trump’s coattails.

Already, party figures are attempting to calm matters.

“They’re the two most important leaders in the Republican Party,” said Brian Ballard, a longtime Florida lobbyist with connections to both men, predicting Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis “will be personal and political friends for the rest of their careers.”

Good lord. They’re both monsters. I think J.V. Last has this right, however:

I wrote about the brewing Trump-DeSantis feud back in July, when it was clear that DeSantis was Single White Female-ing Trump to a degree that was going to get super uncomfortable.

Now the fight is almost out in the open and I am here to tell you that if DeSantis doesn’t back off, he’s going to get blowed up.

Reasons:

(1) DeSantis is a phony. Trump is authentic.

You’re not supposed to remember this, but DeSantis is a smarty-pants, Ivy League elite lawyer who is playacting as a populist crusader. Trump is the real thing.

Just look at the booster stuff: DeSantis almost certainly got the booster. But he’s now caught in No Man’s Land where he has positioned himself as quasi anti-vax, even though he’s received the vaccines.

Or look at the anti-lockdown rhetoric: DeSantis is pushing revisionist history about how he refused to impose any sort of precautions in Florida.

If this turns into a hot war, Trump is going to crush him. Maybe it’s possible to outflank Trump on vaccines, but not if you’re a phony who took the vaccines.

Republican primary voters will smell that a mile away.

(2) You can’t beat Trump on “conservative” policy.

Remember back when Cruz, Rubio, Walker, and the rest were going to box Trump in because he didn’t hold the line on conservative policy orthodoxies? How’d that work out?

Anti-vax is a new conservative orthodoxy and I am skeptical that a fight about policy on these grounds is going to matter to Republican voters, either.

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. And even if that were possible, Ron DeSantis isn’t capable of doing it because at bottom, he’s just another establishment elite climber trying to pull off a triple bank shot.

(3) Sunk cost.

So you’re a Republican primary voter. You’ve mortgaged your entire political identity to Donald Trump. You left Reaganism. Took the Trump ride. Bought the t-shirt. Wore the hat.

You’ve forced yourself to believe some crazy shit. About QAnon. About the 2020 election being stolen. About COVID being overhyped. About Joe Biden having dementia. All because this was the price of admission to be on Trump’s side.

And now you’re going to chuck all of that and admit you were wrong about Trump in order to throw in with Ron DeSantis?

That’s not how things typically work for people exiting belief systems.

(4) If DeSantis challenges Trump, he’ll be marked forever.

Ron DeSantis isn’t stupid. He’s seen the same things we’ve all seen. If you’re a Republican and you get crosswise with Trump, one of two things happens: You get pushed out of the party, or you eventually bend the knee in order to stay in the party.

We have so many examples it’s stupid.

What DeSantis should understand is that this choice is a trap. Because even the people who surrender after challenging Trump are politically maimed. They become damaged goods in the minds of Republican voters.

Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz. Lindsey Graham. Nikki Haley. Chris Christie. Kevin McCarthy. Mitch McConnell. Once you’ve bent the knee to Trump, you have to fight like hell just to keep your station. Moving up in the world? Forget about it.

Why is this? Because no one who has submitted to Trump after getting clobbered by him is capable of selling the dominance politics that Republican voters want.

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.1

I suspect that DeSantis is smart enough to understand this. If so, then he’ll wait until the last possible minute and then swerve to avoid a full collision with Trump. Perhaps he understands that Trump has little respect for the people who truckle to him and he thinks that the best way to get to the VP slot in 2024 is by showing just enough alpha that Trump respects him—but not so much as to become a threat.

Nobody has yet been able to thread that needle. And truth be told, I don’t think it’s possible. But there’s a first time for everything.

This seems right. If all these people want a dominating, whiny bully, DeSantis would certainly fit the bill. In fact, there are a whole bunch of right wingers who fit that bill. But they’re not Trump. They don’t have the X-factor that makes him so beloved by tens of millions of Republicans. I don’t pretend to understand the appeal of either Trump or Desantis, but I do think Trump has more of it.

If they go head to head, I’d bet on Trump any time.

Published inUncategorized