By Noah Rothman
Tuesday,
May 30, 2023
The
Florida governor doesn’t look like he’s going to pull his punches, which should
make for the biggest test yet of Trump’s appeal to Republican voters.
Florida governor
Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign had been off to a rocky start even
before launch day. DeSantis backers who hoped to see the embryonic campaign
right itself were discouraged by its formal kickoff on Twitter, which
struggled with technological hiccups and seemed designed to appeal to the
narrow “very online” faction of the Right rather than average voters. We can
safely assume that the DeSantis campaign recognized these early mistakes,
because it has corrected for them.
In the
days since, the candidate has dropped the emphasis on Bitcoin and the “woke
mind virus.” He has replaced those messages with one that stresses something
closer to DeSantis’s core strength: Not just his fealty to conservative
ideological goals but his managerial acumen in their pursuit. It’s a pitch that
has allowed him to take direct aim at Donald Trump.
In
an interview with Ben Shapiro last week, DeSantis unloaded
on the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. He accused Trump of attacking
him “by moving left,” and said Trump was “a different guy” than the one who ran
for the White House in 2016. He attacked Trump for supporting a
pathway to citizenship for some non-citizens, signing a criminal-justice-reform bill and
“bloated” omnibus spending bills, and “turning the reins over” to Dr. Anthony
Fauci at the height of the pandemic. He hit back at Trump’s efforts to rewrite
the history of the pandemic — including the suggestion that New York
governor Andrew Cuomo’s policies had been preferable to
Florida’s. He
called Trump’s conduct “bizarre,” and he argued that Trump’s refusal to
recognize his own mistakes suggests he would make them all over again if he
were entrusted with the White House once more.
The
DeSantis team isn’t shying away from deploying the same kind of unrestrained
rhetorical assault on Donald Trump and his defenders that they themselves so
often use against opponents. When a Trump campaign
operative claimed
that DeSantis’s history of seeking elected office was evidence that he’s
“someone who’s in it for himself” rather than the country, the DeSantis team’s
rapid-response shop fired back with evidence of their candidate’s military
record.
In
response, a reliable Trump surrogate published
images of
Representative Dan Crenshaw, former representative Adam Kinzinger, and the late
senator John McCain. A less self-assured campaign devoted to overthinking the
race might have been caught flatfooted by the in-group goading here. This was a
not-so-subtle brushback pitch designed to scare the DeSantis campaign out of
defending Republicans in uniform because some such Republicans had broken with
Donald Trump at various points in their careers. But the DeSantis campaign is
not such a soft operation. “Team Trump: Being in the military doesn’t mean
s**t. Happy Memorial Day.” the DeSantis
rapid-response account replied.
“Everyone
knows if I’m the nominee, I will beat Biden, and I will serve two terms,”
DeSantis pointedly told Fox News
Channel viewers this
weekend. He argued that if he is elected, there will be “no more excuses about
why we couldn’t get it done.” And he made a forceful effort to turn what is
seen by many as a glaring liability — his ongoing dispute with the Walt Disney
Company — into a strength. “He’s taken the side of Disney in our fight down
here in Florida,” DeSantis said
of Trump. “I’m
standing for parents. I’m standing for children, and I think a multi-billion
dollar company that sexualizes children is not consistent with the values of
Florida or the values of a place like Iowa.”
This
barrage of criticism capped off a weekend of brutal fisticuffs, and it forced
Donald Trump into a position his supporters rarely see from the former
president: a defensive crouch.
Retreating
to his alternative social-media fiefdom, Truth Social, Trump responded to
DeSantis’s accusations of mixed loyalties when it comes to Disney. “Ron
DeSanctimonious just stated, without correction on Fox & Friends,
that I was ‘backing’ Disney,” the former
president fumed.
“Wrong! Fox should have read my posted TRUTH on Disney, but that’s not the game
they play.”
Trump
went on to protest the suggestion that his campaign’s conciliatory
messages toward
the children’s entertainment company suggest that he doesn’t have
the stomach for
the fight DeSantis picked. “This all happened during the Governorship of ‘Rob’
DeSanctimonious,” read the former president’s
inscrutable attack on
the governor’s record of somehow presiding over Disney’s leftward drift.
“Instead of complaining now, for publicity reasons only, he should have stopped
it long ago.”
These
early skirmishes are promising. The DeSantis campaign has shown a willingness
to ignore those who argue that it should be as hostile toward Republicans who
don’t toe the Trump line as Trump is, a strategy that would entail abandoning a
readymade contrast between the two candidates. It has instead attacked its
primary rival in no uncertain terms, and on terrain that is less than favorable
for Trump. And it has put Trump on the defensive on the Disney issue, which
looked not long ago like it might be a weakness for DeSantis. This is evidence
of a fleetfooted campaign that can learn from its mistakes.
Whether
the DeSantis campaign can sustain this fusillade remains to be seen. But the
early signs suggest that the Florida governor isn’t going to pull his punches,
which should make for the biggest test yet of Trump’s appeal to Republican
voters.
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