The Republican challenger who could out-Trump Trump
I have seen the future of the Republican Party, said Rich Lowry in National Review, and his name is Ron DeSantis. Florida’s governor has all of Donald Trump’s strengths, but without the “baggage and selfishness”. Unlike the former president, he’s not obsessed with relitigating the election, but he has the same “zest for combat on cultural issues”. He has gone to war with Disney over Florida’s parentalrights bill – dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by his opponents and the liberal media – which bans discussions about sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms until third grade (ages eight to nine). When Disney, a major employer and donor in the state, criticised the bill, calling it a “challenge to basic human rights”, DeSantis hit back, saying he wouldn’t be swayed by the “musings of woke corporations” that remained silent about the brutal practices of the Chinese Communist Party.
For old-school conservatives who never reconciled themselves to Trump, DeSantis is the “Goldilocks candidate”, said Matt Lewis in The Daily Beast: “conventional enough to suit them, while still being controversial enough to satisfy the MAGA crowd”. Yes, he’s a “jerk” and a “blowhard”, but the hope is that he will be Trump “minus the unnecessary chaos, campaign defeats and attempted coups”. Essentially, they hope a DeSantis candidacy will mean that Trump doesn’t run again.
From the liberal perspective, said Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times, a President DeSantis “might well match or exceed Trump as liberals’ worst nightmare”. He’s a “true-believer ideologue” who was the nation’s leading opponent of Covid lockdowns, but he’s also smart and in control of the detail. A Yale graduate with a Harvard law degree who served as a navy attorney at Guantánamo Bay, he “runs his political career like a military campaign”. He has dismissed speculation that he will run for president in 2024, but Trump is clearly worried, judging by the veiled attacks he has made – criticising politicians like DeSantis who have refused to reveal their vaccine status as “gutless”, and reportedly describing him as an ingrate with a “dull personality”. Trump, whose own presidential ambitions grew, some say, after Barack Obama baited him at the 2011 dinner for White House correspondents, “should know better than to toss insults at a politician like DeSantis – a bulldog who does not back down from a fight”.