Analysis: Trump and DeSantis assess they should face each other in the Republican party primaries

Former President Donald Trump and his more serious potential rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, laid out this past weekend (3) how their contrasting personalities and approaches would define the 2024 race for the Republican nomination.

Trump served his familiar mix of rage, falsehoods and devious bravado at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, announcing himself as the only man who could save the planet from World War III, preparing his adoring supporters for his “final battle”. ” against the communists, globalists and the “Deep State”, declaring: “I am your retribution”.

“We are going to defeat the Democrats, we are going to defeat the fake news media, we are going to expose and properly deal with RINOs (Republicans in name only). We are going to throw Joe Biden out of the White House and we are going to rid America of these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” Trump told the crowd at a Maryland convention center on the outskirts of Washington on Saturday.

DeSantis, who has yet to declare a campaign, used an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California on Sunday to channel the same conservative anger at what he says is a takeover by the leftist elite of politics, education, Covid-19, politics. public health and big business, exploring the ideological strength of the modern Republican Party.

He offered, however, a much more specific plan than Trump for a government breakup, strongly suggesting that after implementing hardline conservatism in the state of Florida, he could deliver on policy goals that often eluded Trump in his chaotic tenure in the White House.

“I can tell you that in four years you haven’t seen our administration leak like a sieve, haven’t seen a lot of drama or palace intrigue,” said DeSantis, whose speaking style is much more orderly and methodical than Trump’s. “What you saw was a precise, surgical execution. Day after day. And by doing that, we beat the left day after day.”

The back-to-back speeches, which singled out two Republicans who would be front-runners if DeSantis entered the race for the GOP nomination, came with a hint of irony.

CPAC, where Trump spoke, for decades kept alive the flame of two-term President Reagan, who redefined the conservative movement when he won the 1980 election and left a legacy that dominated the Republican Party until the arrival of Trump.

Once a rite of passage for potential GOP presidential candidates, the CPAC has since become a platform for Trump’s personality cult. DeSantis did not speak there, instead appearing last week at a duel at the Club for Growth donor conference to which Trump was not invited.

Speaking in Reagan’s shadow on Sunday, DeSantis seemed to be vindicating both the 40th president’s reformist zeal and offering an updated and more targeted — but nonetheless striking — version of Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”

He appeared to be trying to build a conservative coalition that would appeal to Republicans who chafed at Trump after his record two impeachments, a U.S. Capitol insurrection and a disastrous intervention in the 2022 midterm election, but that too could alienate some supporters. of Trump who still love their champion but doubt he has the discipline and appeal needed to win a national election again.

Still, if DeSantis were to win the Republican nomination, there would likely be questions about whether his own radicalism would hurt him in the same state districts where Trump lost the 2020 election — despite a more disciplined public persona than Trump’s.

There’s not much subtlety in his rhetoric about a “waking mind virus”: much of the Florida governor’s phrasing comes with the implication that anyone who doesn’t share his views is, by definition, a left-wing extremist. And he would essentially be promising Americans one of the most right-wing presidencies in modern history.

GOP field begins to take shape

DeSantis was not the only possible alternative to Trump, who has laid out his case in recent days. Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who has already launched a campaign, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who may do so, have braved the lions’ den at CPAC and launched thinly-veiled attacks on the former chief. .

“If you’re tired of losing, trust a new generation,” Haley said, building on criticism that both Trump, 76, and Biden, 80, should bow to younger leaders.

Pompeo, who, like his former cabinet colleague, got a fairly lukewarm reception in the former president’s territory, piled his speech with plausible denials to avoid taking on Trump directly.

But one remark reads as much as a critique of the former president and the Democrats he specifically targeted when he said, “We cannot become the left, following celebrity leaders with their own brand of identity politics, those with fragile egos that refuse to acknowledge reality”.

Another potential Republican candidate, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, was on the “State of the Union” program of the CNN on Sunday and attacked Trump’s fearsome culture war rant.

“If you want to heal our land and unite our country, don’t do it by appealing to the angry mob,” Hutchinson told Dana Bash.

“Wherever you look at the leader of our country, you don’t want him to get involved in a personal vendetta. And when he talks about revenge, he’s talking about his personal vendettas, and that’s not healthy for America. It is certainly not healthy for our party.”

Another potential anti-Trump GOP candidate, former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, however, announced on Sunday that he would drop out of the 2024 race to avoid splintering opposition to the former president.

“Right now you have Trump and DeSantis at the top of the field, soaking up all the oxygen, getting all the attention, and then a lot of us in the single digits. And the more of them you have, the less chance you have of anyone getting up,” Hogan told CBS News.

The Dark Race of Trump v DeSantis

If Hogan’s reluctant decision to withdraw foreshadows similar decisions by other long-serving candidates, it could point to a Republican nomination race that doesn’t replicate the fractured anti-Trump vote that helped his remarkable rise to power in 2016.

John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser who is now a vehement critic of his former boss, made exactly that point during an appearance on “CNN This Morning” on Monday, saying the GOP’s focus should be to “eliminate Trump from the nomination process as soon as possible”.

But a narrower field of candidacy would also fuel the possibility of a long and bitter race between Trump and DeSantis through a series of winner-take-all primaries — if the Florida governor decides to enter the race.

Given his strong hold on the Republican base, Trump is likely to be seen as the frontrunner for the nomination, but he appears to recognize the potential threat he faces from DeSantis and has already accused him of disloyalty after endorsing him in his first race for the mansion. of the governor in Tallahassee.

But DeSantis, in his new book published last week, attributes his success in that first gubernatorial campaign to a “massive coup” fueled by a strong Republican primary performance that occurred after he won Trump’s endorsement.

He is trying to distinguish himself as a winner compared to Trump, citing his re-election victory last fall, which implicitly contrasts with the former president’s loss in the national re-election.

“We went from winning 32,000 votes in 2018 to winning more than 1.5 million votes in 2022. We won the highest percentage of votes any Republican candidate for governor has received in Florida history,” DeSantis said Sunday.

However, the weekend’s events also pointed to some of DeSantis’ possible responsibilities in any attempt to topple Trump.

While his speech at the Reagan Library demonstrated a flair for explaining policy and a conversational style, he lacked the showmanship skills that Trump has long used to dominate Republican politics.

Trumpism has always been more of a visceral and emotional reaction than an exercise in actual implementation of ideological conservatism.

Perhaps GOP voters are so eager to win back the presidency that they’ll look for a change, but in his CPAC speech, which echoed the “American carnage” themes of his inaugural address, Trump warned DeSantis and the rest of the country who will fight with everything he has to win the White House again.

He told reporters that even if he is indicted in federal or state investigations against him, he would still not drop out of the race.

“Ultimately, anyone else will be bullied, bought, blackmailed or torn apart. I alone will never back down,” Trump said.