What If Ron DeSantis Is Less Crazy Than Donald Trump?

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, March 10, 2023

 

There’s a question haunting the minds of political junkies. What if Ron DeSantis is less crazy than Donald Trump?

 

There are several versions of it, because the semantic range of “crazy” in our politics is especially large.

 

For people on the left, the prospect of DeSantis has been met with some terror, because they fear he has Trump’s will to power but lacks Trump’s fundamental frivolousness and distractibility. Trump spent hours a day watching television coverage of the Trump administration and tweeting about it, rather than, you know, trying to get the Congress to build his wall, or ban Muslims, or take actual effective steps toward a coup after the 2020 election.

 

Brynn Tannehill gave voice to this view in the New Republic:

 

The damage Trump was able to do was limited by his lack of discipline, ignorance of how the system worked, laziness, and lack of motivation. He is simply a narcissist who likes feeling rich, powerful, and important. DeSantis, however, is none of these things. He is not lazy. He has discipline, motivation, and an intimate knowledge of how to use the system to get what he wants.

 

But there are those who think Trump’s greatest political asset was his craziness. Republican partisans worry about it, and committed Never Trumpers delight in the idea that DeSantis just isn’t crazy enough to win the Republican nomination. DeSantis won’t attack a Gold Star family. He won’t have an Access Hollywood tape. He won’t threaten to put his electoral opponent in jail. He won’t compare buttons with Kim Jong-un.

 

For them the theory is that the GOP primary electorate is entirely committed to Trumpism as a kind of troll of the existing political class. They are voting for the entertainment of it all — largely indifferent to policy or governance. This is the idea of Trump as post-scarcity political figure. Americans are so accustomed to things working out in the end that they vote for a breaker of norms just for the kick it provides.

 

The fact is, no one can quite agree on what Ron DeSantis following Donald Trump means. Some who loved Trump’s iconoclastic campaign for president are even more enthusiastic about DeSantis in 2024. They see him as an extension of Trump — more energetic, more competent, and more electable. In some cases, they see him as more populist — on Covid restrictions and vaccines. Other Republicans are going to support DeSantis enthusiastically because for them, DeSantis represents a bridge away from Trump and Trumpism. In their mind he’s a figure who can unite the party. He excites some populist and nationalist Republicans while simultaneously reopening the future leadership of the party to non-populist, non-nationalist factions. At the same time, there are Republicans who still find DeSantis too Trumpy to tolerate. Or not Trumpy enough.

 

But what if it’s just simpler than all this? I know it’s nuts to posit this, but what if Trump’s “craziness” was an electoral drag? What if that’s what drove people to embrace Ted Cruz as a potential alternative? What if it’s what drove suburban women away from the GOP, since Trump seemed both crude and unstable? What if that explains why Trump did worse among white men in 2020?

 

What if voters want competence in the execution of policy and administration, and they want someone who demonstrates self-possession?

 

If all that were true, and we turned our eyes to Ron DeSantis, what would we expect to see?

 

Well, it might look like Ron DeSantis in 2022 and 2023 — uniting his entire party, holding the affluent suburbs, and even making inroads in the cities while cruising to reelection in a year when other Republicans struggled. It would mean absolutely eye-popping fundraising numbers. It might mean that the Republican Party can benefit from political realignment on one side of the political spectrum — gaining a larger share of working-class voters of all races, while holding a reunion party on the other side, reaching back into the country clubs, and winning more of the white voters it shed in 2020.

 

Crazy as it sounds.