By Rich
Lowry
Monday,
November 7, 2022
It’s been
“on” for a while, but Donald Trump fired the first shot in his 2024 competition
with Ron DeSantis by calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” at a Pennsylvania rally
over the weekend.
Rumored
to be contemplating an announcement as soon as next week, Trump is obviously
the front-runner for the nomination. Depending on his general-election opponent
and the circumstances, he’d probably have something like a 50/50 shot to win
the presidency again.
So it’s
time to think seriously about what this would look like.
There
are huge pitfalls to Trump 3.0 that would be easily and nearly completely
avoided by nominating and electing DeSantis, or any other Republican
alternative. (I don’t take it as an absolute certainty, by the way, that
DeSantis will run, or that if he does, it will come down at the end to the
Trump–DeSantis contest everyone expects.)
The
difference between nominating Trump and DeSantis — the delta in terms of
Republican prospects and governing potential — is hard to exaggerate.
If Trump
wins the presidency again, it will be mayhem. The reaction of the other side
will make what happened after the 2016 election seem mild in comparison. You
don’t ever want to give the opposition a veto, but how the opposition reacts
affects how a president can govern. Democrats would certainly find a reason to
deny the legitimacy of a President DeSantis, but his cabinet secretaries
probably wouldn’t have to have bomb-sniffing dogs checking their cars every
morning. That would matter, and it would be better than the alternative of the
Left trying to convince itself, in a paroxysm of anti-Trump rage, that it needs
to try to forge some sort of American color revolution.
Then
there’s the question of age. Trump seems youthful and vital compared with
President Biden. He’s still 76 years old, though. In the unlikely event that
Biden runs again, a Trump–Biden race will be aged-on-aged violence that will be
a great victory, one way or the other, for the American gerontocracy. A
DeSantis–Biden race, on the other hand, would set up a simple future-vs.-past
contest like Clinton vs. Dole in 1996 or Obama vs. McCain in 2008.
Although
Trump looks as if he could be doing campaign rallies until he’s 90, time comes
for us all. There’s no guarantee that Trump won’t start encountering Biden-like
aging problems, either during a general election or in a prospective second
term. Why risk it, when there are palatable, new-generation alternatives?
Trump is
tethered to the past in a more important way than his age. If he’s the nominee,
every Republican in the country would either have to endorse his delusions
about the 2020 election or find a way to dodge them. And Trump would be paying
attention. He’d presumably be happy to take shots at anyone in the party not
showing sufficient loyalty to “stop the steal,” no matter how
destructive.
DeSantis
or anyone else would spare other Republicans the political pain of getting
pressured this way.
Relatedly,
Trump is not a party-builder. Yes, he’s a movement-builder, but he imagines
that the movement is all about himself. As he demonstrated in Georgia in 2020,
he’s happy to exercise the “Samson option” when crossed — differing only from
Samson by bringing the temple crashing down only on his party, not himself.
There’s
no reason to believe that DeSantis (or the other alternatives) would be
anything other than a responsible leader of the national party genuinely vested
in its growth and welfare.
With
regard to governing prospects, there’s also a big swing. Trump did a number of
truly consequential and creative things policy-wise while in office, but his
erratic nature also limited his ability to deliver. A vendetta tour against all
his real and perceived enemies would now be layered on top of this. Assuming
that Mitch McConnell is still the GOP leader in the Senate, do Republicans
really want a newly elected president and a Senate majority leader who don’t
speak to each other and, worse, a president who has insulted that majority
leader in crude and personal terms?
Trump
has much more of a policy apparatus and government-in-waiting than in 2016, but
he’ll still have trouble hiring for top positions, and a miasma of legal
controversies will continue to trail him everywhere. Again, why choose that
when there are other alternatives who’d start with a clean slate and be able
and willing to work with everyone in the party?
Lastly,
Trump has already shown once before that he can take a winnable national race
and lose it, in part because he couldn’t conceal his personal flaws — he didn’t
even try — and made himself repellent to too many voters for no good reason.
(It’s one thing to be hated for fighting courageous fights; it’s another to be
hated for idiotic tweets and pointless outrages.)
Politics
at the presidential level exposes everyone. The job is so demanding and the
stage so big that no one is completely suited to them. Whatever weaknesses that
DeSantis — or again, other alternatives — has will be revealed in due course.
Yet the Florida governor has never put himself in the position of getting
defeated in a race that easily could have been won, and of denying his loss out
of personal embarrassment. Trump likes to divide the world into winners and
losers, and DeSantis for now is emphatically the former. That, too,
should count for a lot.
We can’t
know how a 2024 fight will play out. We do know that the stakes will be
enormous.
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