The king, the contender and a battle for the Republican party’s heart
Trump mark two is making an impact but presence of the former president may yet be a thorn in his side
They have been waiting for a new warrior to reclaim the White House: a Donald Trump for the next generation. Ron DeSantis promised to fill that void as he strode on to the stage in Pittsburgh vowing to don the “armour of God” and lead the Republican party to victory.
Casting himself as a battle-hardened leader, he pledged to “never, ever surrender to woke ideology” and received a rapturous reception from the 1,000-strong audience.
Mr DeSantis’s appearance in Pennsylvania was part of a mini-tour that took in Arizona and Ohio and ostensibly aimed at boosting support for the Republican Party in key battleground states ahead of November’s midterm elections.
But the 900-mile trek from his governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, is an indication that he is dipping his toe in the waters of the 2024 presidential race.
His 40-minute speech had all the hallmarks of a presidential pitch: a potted personal history, a laundry list of policy achievements and a laser focus on national issues.
It also highlighted the struggle for control of the party after a series of tough primaries, including a bruising loss for Liz Cheney, a party stalwart, crystallised Mr Trump’s hold on its base.
Mr DeSantis, the self-styled “antiwoke” governor, has pitched himself to voters as a younger, more electable version of the 76-year-old firebrand. At 43, he is more than three decades Mr Trump’s junior.
Entering the ballroom of the Wyndham Grand hotel on Friday night to the strains of Sweet Florida, by Van Zant, he took a page from the Trump playbook, tossing baseball caps emblazoned with his name into the adoring crowd. His speech also echoed Mr Trump’s uncompromising approach to violent crime, illegal immigration and banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.
“Woke ideology is a really destructive mind virus,” he said, adding with Churchillian flair: “We must fight the woke in our schools, we must fight the woke in our businesses, and we must fight the woke in our government agencies.”
The crowd reacted with jubilation, frequently jumping to their feet as Mr DeSantis railed against liberal policies.
The new darling of the conservative base, Mr DeSantis sees a winning strategy in modelling Mr Trump’s stoking of culture wars, but with a less combative approach that broadens his appeal. It involves walking a fine line – avoiding attacking the former president, and thus alienating his supporters, while also subtly hinting that the Republican party is no longer beholden to him.
Friday’s event was a rally for Doug Mastriano, a Trump-backed candidate in Pennsylvania’s governor’s race who has repeated the former president’s claims of voter fraud. But Mr DeSantis did not mention Mr Trump by name.
Instead, he name-checked other former leaders and attacked Joe Biden, suggesting the 79-year-old was ill-equipped for the role.
“I think back to some of the other presidents we’ve had. Think about John Kennedy ... think about president Reagan,” he told the crowd as he listed the country’s great leaders.
Whether it will work remains to be seen. Mr Trump retains a vice-like grip on the party base, as evidenced by this week’s ousting of his nemesis, Ms Cheney, from Congress.
Her outspoken criticism of the former president made her a top target and led to her crushing defeat by his hand-picked challenger, Harriet Hageman, in the Wyoming GOP primary.
Ms Cheney, however, has vowed to to frustrate Mr Trump, should he enter
‘DeSantis is very levelheaded, very intelligent. I love what he did with the state of Florida – a lot of people are flocking down there because of him’
the 2024 race, hinting at a White House bid of her own.
She is the latest prominent Republican to put a break with Mr Trump at the heart of a prospective bid. Mike Pence, his former vicepresident, Larry Hogan, the Maryland governor and Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, have made similar rumblings.
But Ms Cheney’s landslide loss has shone a light on the former president’s ability to exact revenge.
Mr Trump has weighed into more than 200 primary races this year and his preferred candidates have triumphed in more than 90 per cent of them, according to one analysis.
He also remains the Republican Party’s unofficial leader in a string of polls, although most suggest there is ample room for a challenger.
They include a NYT/Siena College poll last month that found almost half of Republican voters would prefer another candidate to Mr Trump.
Mr Trump’s potential 2024 opponents spy a further chink in his armour as his legal woes mount.
Laura Ingraham, a Fox News anchor and influential ally of Mr Trump, is among those who have suggested voters may be ready to “turn the page” on the former president after the FBI’s raid on his home.
“They’re exhausted by the battle, the constant battle … they may believe it’s time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump’s policies, who’s not Trump,” she said.
Young activists have indicated Mr DeSantis may be the man for the job.
He is “one of the most popular leaders in America. He has become the model for a new conservative movement,” said Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point Action, the conservative youth group organising Mr DeSantis’s multi-state tour.
Hundreds of his supporters, wearing red “MAGA” hats and shorts and t-shirts in the style of the American flag, queued for hours in downtown Pittsburgh to hear him speak.
“He’s very level-headed, very intelligent. I love what he did with the state of Florida – a lot of people are flocking down there because of him,” said Deb, a 68-year-old retiree. It is the Florida governor’s “even temper” that would earn him her vote over Mr Trump in a hypothetical contest, she said. “These two guys have two different personalities. You could see that,” she added.
But for all the enthusiasm for Mr DeSantis, he has a difficult battle ahead if he is to wrest control of the GOP from its current leader. As Mr Trump continues to tease a third tilt at the White House, many in the audience in Pittsburgh said they would remain loyal. Donna Ninehouser, 65, was certain. “He is the only one who can save this country right now,” she said.
Travis, a 22-year-old university student, said he admired Mr DeSantis’ “backbone”, and his ability to “speak to everyday people”. But given the choice in 2024, he would lean towards Mr Trump. He said: “President Trump has shown results over four years.”
It seems that Mr DeSantis may find by merely echoing Mr Trump he will not succeed in supplanting him.
Liz Cheney is losing her seat in Congress for one reason only. She refuses to play along with the pretence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Donald Trump’s courtiers don’t put it that way, of course. In their version, the Wyoming Congresswoman was an embittered obsessive who was doing the Democrats’ dirty work for them. But they are talking hogwash. Cheney backed both of Trump’s presidential bids and voted for his policies in Congress 92.9 per cent of the time. No, her sole offence was to be a prominent critic of the événements of January 6 2021, when the defeated candidate whipped up a crowd to march on Congress in an attempt to halt the certification of the election result.
In the immediate aftermath of that tawdry coup attempt, Cheney’s views were mainstream. Most Republican politicians publicly blamed Trump for having egged on the mob. Only as it became clear that their voters still backed the old caudillo did they slink back uncomfortably to him.
This, of course, made them embarrassed, and they dealt with their embarrassment in various ways. Some affected to treat the attack on the Capitol as a joke – just a few weirdos in funny clothes, hardly an insurrection, ha ha. Others pretended that the rioters had had nothing to do with Trump or Trumpery. Still others kept schtum, unwilling to perjure themselves, but reluctant to risk their careers when up to 70 per cent of Republican supporters believed that the election was stolen. Worst of all, though, were those who went along with the lie, undermining the legitimacy of America’s institutions rather than daring to cross its most thin-skinned politician.
What made Cheney unpopular was that she refused to shift her position when her colleagues did. She became their conscience, repeating what most of them knew to be true, but no longer dared to say out loud. No wonder they resented her.
Every member of Congress swears an oath to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. Cheney understood that oath to mean accepting election results when your side loses. Without a willingness to abide by the rules, an open society becomes impossible. Even if Trump had no other flaws, his insistence before a single ballot had been cast in either the 2016 or 2020 elections that the only way he could lose would be through fraud should have disqualified him from serious contention. All democracies depend on the elevation of process over outcome. People need to be prepared to accept the verdict of the urns.
But Trump’s personality will not allow him to admit defeat. Whenever he has failed in anything – a business deal, a TV awards ceremony, a round of golf – he has alleged malpractice and claimed victory.
In sophisticated Republican circles, this neediness is laughed off. Trump is Trump, we are told, and it’s silly to take him too seriously. But his inability to see the difference between his interests and the law of the land is no joke. His readiness to mobilise the power of the state against people who have crossed him is no harmless eccentricity. His attempt to overturn the election was no amusing tantrum.
The Republican Party was founded in the name of republican virtue. This did not simply mean having an elected head of state, something that was no longer an issue when the party was launched in 1854. Republican virtue, rather, was understood to mean independence, self-respect, manliness, incorruptibility. It stood in opposition to venality, indolence, cowardice and obsequiousness. In particular, republicanism meant refusing to lay your liberties at the feet of any man, however great or wise.
So how did the GOP come to lay its liberties at the feet of a whining, self-pitying narcissist?
It is hardly as if it was blind to his flaws. Many of those who now grovel most abjectly were very clear, during the 2016 primaries, that Trump was not fit for office. Yet it was not long before they were jettisoning their deepest convictions to keep up with his caprices.
Evangelicals who had railed against Bill Clinton’s adulteries now argued that it was fine to pay off a porn star and lie about it provided that there was no breach of campaign finance rules. Foreign policy hawks justified Trump’s closeness to Putin. Tea partiers were suddenly fine with a trillion-dollar deficit. Patriots cheered when he mocked the family of a fallen American soldier, and made excuses when he stood in Arlington Cemetery and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
One might put the same question to the GOP. What’s in it for them? Why do they continue to abase themselves before a self-obsessed fabulist who came late and opportunistically to their party?
The answer often given to that question is essentially transactional. Yes, Trump might be frightful, but he reaches parts of the electorate that no one else can. So, with all his flaws, he is preferable to the alternative.
But that argument is wrong. In 2016 and again in 2020, Trump was an electoral handicap. In most of the states where there were simultaneous senatorial or gubernatorial contests, he got fewer votes than the downballot Republicans. When, shortly after the 2020 poll, the GOP was poised to win two more Senate seats in Georgia, and so take control of the upper house, he more or less singlehandedly lost them by blundering in and making the vote all about himself.
I just about understand the cult of the successful leader. I don’t like it, and I think it un-American, but I can see why it happens. What I can’t understand is the cult of the unsuccessful leader. There were no Nixonians after 1974, no Carterites after 1980. But Trump is, according to the polls, easily the most popular choice to win the 2024 Republican nomination.
Is it, then, that Republicans love Trump’s policies? He has certainly wrenched the party away from some of its deepest convictions. Where it used to stand for low spending, free trade, a strong foreign policy and strict adherence to the Constitution, it now stands for an activist state, protectionism and indifference to old allies. Hence the degrading sight, over the past two weeks, of Republicans demanding that the FBI be defunded or disbanded for carrying out a judicially warranted search of Trump’s Florida home.
Every electorate has a nativist and protectionist streak. But it is the personality cult that most enthuses Republicans. Trump, I keep being told by his fans, is a man who plays the Left at its own game, who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty, who understands the threat of cultural Marxism. Yes, he might be crude, foul-mouthed, a liar. But one can’t be fastidious when America itself is in peril.
In fact, nothing has so elevated and ennobled America as freedom under the law. The United States was, as the Republican Party’s founder famously put it, “conceived in liberty”. Limited government, the balance of power, the humility and self-restraint of even the highest office-holders – these things are not incidental to American identity. They are the core of American identity. That the Republicans should have become the party that ceases to care is tragic.
In 2016 and 2020, Trump was still running separately from, and in some ways in opposition to, his supposed party.
Not this time. Cheney’s defeat means that, of the 10 Republicans who properly voted to impeach Trump after the riots – his actions on the day had hardly been a secret, after all – only two remain. Many more Reaganite legislators are retiring and being replaced by Trumpians. By “Trumpians”, I partly mean politicians who share his agenda: hostility to immigration, dislike of free trade, a fondness for conspiracy theories. Mainly, though, I mean people who will unhesitatingly shift their views when he shifts his.
“A lot of people misunderstand what is happening in this moment and think the Republican Party might somehow go back to being the party of Liz Cheney and Paul Ryan,” says Tim Miller, an anti-Trump political consultant who worked on campaigns for John McCain, Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. “It’s never going back – at least not any time on the horizon.”
Trump remains the boorish, whingeing man-child he always was. He has not changed. But he has changed his party – malignly and, it seems, irrevocably.
Trump remains the boorish, whingeing man-child. He has not changed. But he has changed his party