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If your name was Ron DeSantis and you were running to be president of the United States, here’s some headlines you might not want to see:
Back in March, I wrote a long piece about why I was very skeptical that DeSantis would be able to take down Trump. My take then was that a myth had grown up about DeSantis’ skills as a politician based on his successes in Florida. Whatever successes DeSantis had there didn’t prove that he was ready for the national scene. He was likely to be treated with respectful curiosity by conservatives who had heard good things about him, but without any clear explanation for why they should vote for him rather than Trump, he would struggle to gain traction.
Events since March have, in my mind, basically reinforced these points. DeSantis is polling even worse against Trump today than he was in January, his initial campaign strategy is in tatters, and there’s no apparent way for him to turn things around. In other words, DeSantis is still blowing it.
DeSantis: A purer conservative?
So far, DeSantis’ case for himself has been based on the idea that he is a better Trump, and this in turn has been based on two of Trump’s perceived weak spots: conservative credentials and competence.
The idea that Trump lacks conservative credentials might seem outlandish, but it is actually based on a grain of understanding. Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic conservatism has come to define the GOP so much that it’s easy to forget that based on the issues that used to dominate the party, he stands somewhat to the left. He’s a Manhattan playboy, not a committed campaigner for conservative cultural views, and unlike figures like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, he doesn’t talk constantly about the need to take welfare away from Republican voters. If primary voters really care about these heresies, the theory goes, maybe they could be convinced to vote for someone expounding a truer faith.
There are at least three problems with this. The first is that although Trump might not be a fire-breathing culture warrior, he has delivered more than enough concrete results to persuade cultural conservatives to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s largely thanks to his willingness to throw aside long-established norms in pursuit of conservative goals that Republicans took control of the Supreme Court and overthrew Roe v. Wade. The biblical figure who evangelicals most like to compare Trump to is King David, who greatly sinned yet ultimately served the cause of God. Christian conservatives generally understand Trump’s wayward character, but given what he has achieved for them, they just don’t really care.
The second problem DeSantis has is that Trump’s economic heresies actually work in his favor, not against him. It was Romney and Ryan who were out of touch with the economic views of Republican voters, not Trump. One of the things that makes Trump such a formidable political figure is that he found a way to talk to secular, Northern, non-college white voters who had been turned off by the pre-Trump GOP’s relentless focus on reducing deficits by cutting welfare. The fact that he used deficits to finance large tax cuts for corporations is less relevant to such voters than the fact he doesn’t want to privatize Social Security and Medicare. DeSantis, on the other hand, has a record of espousing Ryan-esque views which call for doing just that.
DeSantis’ third problem - and by far the biggest - is that none of these issues matter so much as the fact that Trump has reoriented Republican politics largely around himself. Although abortion and economics remain important issues, particularly to some subsets of activists, the struggle of Donald Trump versus “the Establishment” looms much larger. Trump’s ongoing legal battles, his relationship with the media, and the idea that the “deep state” is out to destroy the MAGA movement remain the staples of the conservative infosphere. Trump is the star around which the entire solar system revolves, and that leaves little room for anyone else. After all, Ron DeSantis can hardly claim to be doing more to defend Donald Trump than Donald Trump himself.
DeSantis: …. Competent?
That leaves DeSantis with another, related, avenue of attack on Trump: claiming to be more competent. This point is in some ways much more convincing than the first. Since his campaign’s inception, DeSantis’ supporters have liked to point out that their guy has been busy getting policy wins in Florida while Donald Trump has been busy tweeting and blustering in the media. As well as attacking Trump for a lack of focus on actually achieving conservative policy wins, they like to point to his track record of losing elections: Trump basically fluked his way to victory against a weak opponent in 2016, got destroyed in the 2018 midterms, lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, and then led the GOP to defeat again in the 2022 midterms. DeSantis, on the other hand, romped to victory in that same year and - so the argument goes - can do the same in 2024.
Whether DeSantis would actually be a better candidate than Trump in 2024 is an open question - I think there are some reasons to think he might be, just because Trump is so woeful - but in order to get there, DeSantis first has to win the Republican primary. And there are a lot of reasons to think that the competence argument is not going to help him do that.
The first is that DeSantis doesn’t actually seem to be very competent. Like I argued back in March, it’s fairly easy to look competent as a Republican governor in Florida, a red state with a weak local Democratic Party (so weak that they ran a literal former Republican against DeSantis in 2022). At the national level, DeSantis has so far committed mistake after mistake. He entrusted his campaign launch to Elon Musk, turning it into a laughing stock. He has dithered in the face of relentless attacks from Trump, seeming unsure about whether and how to strike back. He keeps getting the tone and content of his rhetoric wrong, whether it be dismissing the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” or releasing an anti-LGBT video so extreme that even fellow Republicans criticized it. Now he’s busy cutting staff and rethinking his entire campaign strategy, implying that he’s made serious mistakes so far.
DeSantis also has an even deeper problem. Many of his missteps - particularly the comments about Ukraine and the anti-LGBT video - reveal that the entire idea of trying to be a “more competent Trump” is based on a misunderstanding of what Trumpism actually is.
Trump undoubtedly lacks ideological discipline and often speaks nonsense, but these are key parts of his power, not weaknesses. Look, for instance, at how the two men handle Ukraine. Trump’s position - that he will somehow force Zelensky and Putin into an unspecified deal because he, Donald Trump, is a unique genius - is absolutely absurd, as
explored in a recent post. But Trump’s skill lies in saying things so absurd that they’re hard to refute succinctly, or without drawing all manner of inferences which partisans can dismiss as being in bad faith. I can explain that, as an expert in international politics, it is inconceivable to me that Trump could achieve his goal without selling out Ukraine to Putin. But someone can then always tell me I’m wrong, and that actually Trump wrote this whole book called The Art of the Deal which explains how he’d do it, and before you know it we’re having an unedifying “debate” on terms largely set by Trump. By contrast, DeSantis has a tendency to say things that are so blunt and objectionable that they’re easy to condemn - even for many other Republicans.Trump may not be very competent at governing, but he is undoubtedly very competent at this form of coded communication with the GOP base. DeSantis has shown no similar ability. He instead runs up against the logical inconsistency that has always lain at the heart of “Trumpism without Trump”: the greater part of Trumpism is a particular style of communication which is both impossible to imitate and ultimately depends on Trump’s unique relationship to his audience. When battling an opponent whose great strength is what he leaves unsaid, logical coherence and clarity are poor tools indeed.
A reset?
There is, perhaps, one last route available for DeSantis, and it may be the one he is now taking. Today he will sit for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper after months of only engaging with hyper-partisan media. Unless DeSantis plans to try to use it to generate some sort of viral moment (“DeSantis OWNS Tapper!”), this may herald a key part of his campaign’s reset. Having realized the pointlessness of trying to out-Trump Trump, perhaps DeSantis is trying to consolidate the support of Trump-skeptical primary voters by pivoting to the center.
If I were running DeSantis’ campaign, that’s probably what I’d try to do as well. The campaign is on a road to nowhere, and something else is at least worth trying. But “worth trying” doesn’t mean there’s much chance of success, as the legion of other more mainstream Republican figures that Trump destroyed in the past can attest. As long as Trump is in the race, he can’t be defeated without taking away a chunk of his voters. According to current polls, even if every single voter who doesn’t currently plan to vote for Trump voted for DeSantis, DeSantis would still lose. And in reality, the anti-Trump vote will be split among a number of other candidates. Consolidating that anti-Trump vote while also taking a chunk of voters away from Trump means pivoting to the center while at the same time out-Trumping Trump. It’s likely not possible, even for a very skilled politician - which DeSantis is not.
With his chances for a reset meagre, all DeSantis is left with is this: he has managed to position himself as the most likely alternative to Trump in the event that the latter dies, ends up in prison, or is otherwise incapacitated. It’s hard to escape the impression that he never really had a plan for taking Trump down himself, and that he instead assumed that Trump would implode all on his own. That remains his most plausible path to victory today - one that many before him have placed their hope in, only to be bitterly disappointed in their turn.