TRUMP, DESANTIS TENSIONS SIMMER
Fla. governor hasn’t said he’d stand down if Trump runs in ’24
For months, former President Donald Trump has been grumbling quietly to friends and visitors to his Palm Beach mansion about a rival Republican power center in another Florida mansion, some 400 miles to the north.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man Trump believes he put on the map, has been acting far less like an acolyte and more like a future competitor, Trump complains. With his stock rising fast in the party, the governor has conspicuously refrained from saying he would stand aside if Trump runs for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
“The magic words,” Trump has said to several associates and advisers.
That long-stewing resentment burst into public view recently in a dispute over a seemingly unrelated topic: COVID policies. After DeSantis refused to reveal his full COVID vaccination history, the former president publicly acknowledged he had received a booster. Last week, he seemed to swipe at DeSantis by blasting as “gutless” politicians who dodge the question out of fear of blowback from vaccine skeptics.
DeSantis’ response came Friday in an interview on the conservative podcast “Ruthless.” Speaking in front of an in-person audience in St. Petersburg, Fla., the governor said one of his biggest regrets was not forcefully opposing Trump’s calls for lockdowns when the coronavirus first began to spread in the spring of 2020.
“Knowing now what I know then, if that was a threat earlier, I would have been much louder,” DeSantis said.
The back and forth exposed how far Republicans have shifted to the right on coronavirus politics. The doubts Trump amplified about public health expertise have only spiraled since he left office. Now his defense of the vaccines — even if often subdued and almost always with the caveat in the same breath that he opposes mandates — has put him uncharacteristically out of step with the hard-line elements of his party’s base and provided an opening for a rival.
But that it was DeSantis — a once-loyal member of the Trump court — wielding the knife made the tension about much more.
At its core, the dispute amounts to a stand-in for the broader challenge confronting Republicans. They are led by a defeated former president who demands total fealty and is determined to sniff out, and then snuff out, any threat to his control of the party.
That includes the 43year-old DeSantis, who has told friends he believes Trump’s expectation that he bend the knee is asking too much. That refusal has set up a generational clash and a test of loyalty in the de facto capital of today’s GOP, one watched by Republicans elsewhere who have ridden to power on Trump’s coattails.
Already, party figures are attempting to calm matters.
“They’re the two most important leaders in the Republican Party,” said Brian Ballard, a longtime Florida lobbyist with connections to both men, predicting Trump and DeSantis “will be personal and political friends for the rest of their careers.”
Trump’s aides also have tried to tamp down questions about the former president’s frustrations, so as not to elevate DeSantis.
Still, Trump, 75, has made no secret of his preparations for a third run for the White House. And while DeSantis, who is up for re-election this year, has not declared his plans, he is widely believed to be eyeing the presidency.
DeSantis is often the first name Republicans cite as a possible Trump-style contender not named Trump.
“DeSantis would be a formidable 2024 candidate in the Trump lane should Trump not run,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. “He’s Trump but a little smarter, more disciplined and brusque without being too brusque.”
DeSantis was a littleknown Florida congressman in 2017 when Trump, who was then the president, spotted him on television and took keen interest. DeSantis, an Ivy League-educated military veteran and smooth-talking defender of the new president, was exactly what Trump liked in a politician.
It wasn’t long before Trump blessed DeSantis’ bid for governor and sent in staff to help him, lifting the lawmaker to a victory over a better-known rival for the party’s nomination.
DeSantis survived the general election and has often governed in a style that mirrors his patron. But as with other Republicans he has endorsed, the former president appears to take a kind of ownership interest in DeSantis.
“Look, I helped Ron DeSantis at a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in an interview for a forthcoming book, “Insurgency,” on the rightward shift of the Republican Party, by The New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters. Trump said he believed DeSantis “didn’t have a chance” of winning without his help.