A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of Donald Trump. Like Banquo’s ghost, Trump’s shade would not go down. Now it has returned to exercise once more its infernal dominion over the GOP.
A sign of how much Trump still spooks Republicans is the speed with which, on the one hand, they began lining up behind him as he surged in the polls following his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and, on the other, scurried like rats from Trump’s rival apparent, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), as his poll numbers consequently sagged. Thanks to these dual blows, DeSantis has been deluged with a cascade of media reports that he’s “stumbling,” “faltering,” “in a rut,” “facing headwinds,” “wobbling,” and “scuffling.”
REPUBLICAN VOTERS ARE A LONG WAY FROM MAKING UP THEIR MINDS
The barrage of negative headlines has been so unrelenting that figures in the Republican Party have started wondering what many of the politerati already were: Perhaps DeSantis would be better off waiting until 2028 to pursue the Republican presidential nomination. That would be a grievous mistake. Not only must DeSantis run this year, but the GOP’s powers that be must also insist he do so — and for the same reason he’s being encouraged not to: the challenge, though a necessary one, of confronting Trump head-on.
Right now, cowardice and short-term calculation define the GOP’s response to the choice before it. A spate of Republican members of Congress already endorsed Trump, including half of those from Florida. Their rationales range from politics as usual to the petty. Many of the Florida representatives were endorsed by Trump, who has now called in that chit. Trump gathered them at Mar-a-Lago to thank them for their loyalty and as a display of dominance against his Sunshine State foe. Their reward: a Trump statement released the next morning lambasting DeSantis for creating “misery and despair” in Florida and trashing their home state as one of the “worst” on a host of quality-of-life measures.
While the prospect of being wined and dined at Mar-a-Lago was no doubt enticing, avoiding a Trump-backed primary challenge and not being subject to the abuse and vituperation of his online MAGA hordes was probably even more appealing. Several in the Florida delegation complained that DeSantis didn’t personally ask for their endorsements (his staff reached out to them), while Trump did. One even whined that although she received a handwritten letter from Florida first lady Casey DeSantis expressing condolences for her father’s death, it wasn’t signed by the governor. A Trump-endorsing congressman from a different state who didn’t serve with DeSantis observed that his colleagues who did were annoyed by his preference for “getting on FaceTime with his wife and kids for an hour or two” instead of going out for a beer with the gang.
Taking the easy way out, going along to get along, is a typical human response. But too often, the path of expedience and least resistance has transformed into the road to perdition. Something the traveler only notices when it is too late.
One who is arguably marching headlong down it is Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT). As head of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, Daines’s decision to endorse Trump is understandable. He doesn’t want Trump saddling the party with a menagerie of freaks for Senate candidates as he did in 2022. If backing Trump is the price to pay for keeping the likes of Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, Doug Mastriano, and Kari Lake in their cages, then so be it. For Daines, the bargain makes sense. Yet that makes it no less likely to be a self-defeating one, for it comes with no guarantee he won’t wind up playing zookeeper anyway. Trump will do what he feels is in his best interest. And if that means once again foisting a bunch of weirdos on the party who’ll sabotage its hopes of recapturing the Senate, then the party be damned. As Republicans have learned to their considerable consternation, damnation is often the outcome of rewarding Trump.
Anyone looking to the GOP’s moneymen to make up their elected counterparts’ dearth of valor should look elsewhere. “Major Republican donors,” warned Bloomberg, “are losing confidence” that anyone “will displace” Trump. Not that they’re trying very hard. Instead, like Agnes Flanders, they’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas. Several conceded to Reuters that “there is no concerted effort by them to weaken the former president.” Nor are they ready to get behind DeSantis even though they also admit he’s “the best candidate to beat Trump.” Three of the party’s biggest donors, Ken Griffin, Thomas Peterffy, and Andy Sabin, have expressed dissatisfaction with DeSantis’s stance on abortion. The latter two also said publicly that his position on “book-banning” is preventing them from backing him. As if being soft on abortion and exposing second graders to pornographic illustrations in children’s books is a path to success in the GOP.
The donors’ disaffection may reflect an awareness that to defeat Trump they’ll have to back someone who supports policies that are more conservative than they find palatable, especially on so-called social issues. That puts them more in line with the former president, who has backed off conservative victories he made possible, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A DeSantis candidacy would force them to put their money where their mouths are when they talk about stopping Trump, even if that means sacrificing some of their policy preferences.
The idea that history repeats is more folk wisdom than reality. But in this case, the Republican Party, from top to bottom, seems to be retracing the steps that led it to Trump in the first place: hoping someone else would go after him, refusing to unite around a solitary challenger, preventing the emergence of such a challenger either by getting into the race despite having no shot and thus further crowding the field. Most of all, the GOP’s action — or, rather, inaction — reeks of fear. Fear of Trump, fear of his supporters, fear of the alternative. President Joe Biden’s reelection announcement made abundantly clear neither he nor the Democratic Party fears Trump at all. Republicans, on the other hand, are deathly afraid of him. This is exactly the reverse of what the party’s attitude toward its front-runner should be.
The moment Trump began rising in the polls after he predicted he’d be indicted, resignation and paralysis seized the Republican Party. It was as though all its hopes and dreams of being finally rid of the turbulent ex-president crumbled to dust. GOP donors, officeholders, and even voters began immediately assuming their own powerlessness.
What makes this meek submission to fate all the more appalling is that the party has in DeSantis someone who appears capable of hacking the gangrenous limb off and, most important of all, willing to perform the surgery. Despite his slippage in the polls, DeSantis remains securely in second place, both nationally and in state surveys, receiving between a quarter and a third of the vote. No other 2024 prospect breaks double digits. He fares better than Trump against Biden in national polls and surveys of battleground states. Republican voters also rate DeSantis more favorably than the former president. One indication of their esteem is that on multiple occasions, large, Trump-friendly crowds have met his anti-DeSantis jibes with silence. By any measure, DeSantis is the most plausible alternative to Trump, maybe the only one.
The sense that he can beat Trump, or at least present a formidable challenge, is as much a source of the reservoir of goodwill DeSantis enjoys within the GOP as is his reputation as the party’s most successful governor and its staunchest culture warrior. They are tributaries flowing into one stream. Together, they give him an advantage possessed by none of his rivals.
Advantages, though, are useful only to the extent they are pressed home. Otherwise, they will be lost. Pressing an advantage home requires courage. But it also requires help. To capitalize on his standing in the GOP, DeSantis will need the GOP’s help. Help the GOP should freely offer. Which brings us to the real, albeit unspoken, reason DeSantis must run for president now: A 2024 DeSantis campaign undertaken with the Republican Party’s full support is the only way Republicans can prove they are ready to leave Trump behind for good.
The longer the party refuses to fight Trump, the more impossible it will seem that he can be stopped, until his suzerainty becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Supporting a challenger to Trump with DeSantis’s stature in the party would show that Republicans are ready to break Trump’s psychic stranglehold over them, that they no longer regard finding another path as unimaginable or unthinkable but are ready to envision a different future.
A 2024 candidacy is no less imperative for DeSantis, and for the same reason. He, too, must demonstrate he’s not scared of Trump. Over the last few weeks, Trump has castigated him mercilessly, calling him names, criticizing his policies, belittling his achievements, denouncing him as a RINO and establishment stooge, even prescribing an “emergency personality transplant” for his putative nemesis. If DeSantis bailed now, after the innuendo, invective, and insinuations, after Trump calumniated Florida as the equivalent of a “s***hole country,” and after acting like a candidate in all but name, he’d look as though he was bullied out of the race. He’d seem, in Trump’s favored parlance, weak, a loser — his big talk exposed as false bravado.
DeSantis prides himself for “going on offense,” unlike other Republicans who “sit around” impotently like “potted plants.” Retreating, particularly after Trump released a video urging him to think twice about running, would turn DeSantis into the biggest ficus around. His reputation for being someone who gives as good as he gets, who stands up to anyone who opposes him, whether that’s Mickey Mouse or Trump, which drives much of his popularity with donors and the base, would be ruined. Winners never quit. And a winner isn’t just what the Republican Party wants. It’s what it needs.
Someone must be St. George to Trump’s dragon, the Duke to his UNLV, must bite Sean Connery’s cheek and prove he’s mortal. Republicans don’t believe they can stop Trump, and that is why they fail. Telling DeSantis to stand down is conceding the battle before a shot is fired. DeSantis has decried Republicans’ “culture of losing.” Surrendering to Trump would perpetuate that culture — as would refusing to take him on at all.
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Especially since Trump has been broadcasting a profound sense of his own vulnerability. Furiously attacking DeSantis even though he’s not yet a candidate, threatening not to participate in any primary debates, making his first campaign ad a 60-second screed charging DeSantis with disloyalty, and opposing a revision to Florida’s law that would allow DeSantis to run for president without resigning as governor, all belie his aura of inevitability. If Trump is afraid, that is all the more reason no one else should be.
DeSantis could wait until 2028, and perhaps he’d suffer few or no adverse consequences for doing so. But the downside of holding off is considerable and immediate, the upside nebulous and theoretical. If he wants to run for president, he should do it now — not just for his sake, but for his party’s, too. Because if he doesn’t, neither may get a second chance to exorcise the demon that has been haunting Republicans since 2015.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.
