Donald Trump has had an enormous influence on the Republican party, making it more populist, more working-class, less capitalist, less “establishment,” more focused on the “culture wars,” and more defiant of the politically-correct cultural elite. And he continues his hold on Republican voters, with some 67% picking him as their favorite candidate for 2024.
A traditional Republican, with establishment credentials and representing the interests of big business and the “rich”–as Republicans used to do–wouldn’t have a chance of getting the nomination of the post-Trump Republican party, even if the former president chooses not to run again. Should that happen, Republican voters are currently favoring Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who shares Trump’s policies and style, over other possible candidates.
Reportedly, Trump and DeSantis are feuding, with the former president annoyed that the governor will not rule out a run against him in the 2024 presidential primaries. Mollie Hemingway says that this is a media-created conflict. But it suggests an interesting thought experiment: What if the two did run against each other?
As we blogged about, anti-vaxxers, though once his fervent supporters, are turning against Trump, who, after all, rushed through getting the vaccines developed. Furthermore, for critics of the way the government has handled the COVID pandemic, Trump is the one who locked down the country and shut down the economy. He is the one who gave a platform to the now-controversial COVID czar Anthony Fauci. Though he gets no credit from mainstream opinion for these actions to combat the disease, he is starting to take flak from the right. Gov. DeSantis, on the other hand, has been a consistent critic of lockdowns, required masking, and forced vaccinations.
Rich Lowry argues that a successful challenge to Trump’s dominance of the Republican party can only come from the right. An excerpt from his National Review column, Ron DeSantis Knows the Formula to Defeat Donald Trump:
In fact, it is likely that the most successful line of attack against a potential candidate Trump will prove, one way or the other, to come from the right.
This critique of Trump wouldn’t be that he tweeted foolish things or violated norms or disgraced himself after the 2020 election. It would be, for example, that he elevated Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, early in the pandemic and listened to his advice for too long. (Intentionally or not, DeSantis alluded to this critique when he said in a recent interview that he would have spoken out against Trump’s stay-at-home guidelines in the spring of 2020.)
The case against Trump would be that, despite all his talk of building the border wall, he didn’t get it done and left a desperately flawed immigration system intact, even though he had two years of a Republican Congress.
That he rattled China’s cage but didn’t make fundamental changes to the U.S. trading relationship and said things that were much too complimentary of President Xi Jinping.
That, finally, he lost to Joe Biden, a desperately flawed candidate who only made it into the White House because Trump made himself so unpopular.
This path would take its cues from the direction Trump has pointed in ideologically, but promise to be more consistent and effectual.
So, carrying on the thought experiment, would you Trump supporters rather vote for Trump or for someone who supports Trump’s policies but would be more effective in carrying them out?
I’m not saying that DeSantis would be more effective. We’re just dealing for now in hypotheticals. Should our political allegiance be to a person or to the cause he represents?
Photo of Ron DeSantis by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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