With Gov. Ron DeSantis’s announcement that he is running for president, the GOP nomination battle has begun in earnest. Some pundits had predicted that the Florida governor would tiptoe around the candidacy of Donald Trump, recognizing that the former president is so popular among Republican voters that any attacks were bound to boomerang on him. But DeSantis has been fairly aggressive against Trump so far. It is still early days, but DeSantis has repeatedly hit Trump on the president’s handling of COVID-19, in particular his once-tight relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose approval rating among Republicans is about the same as athlete’s foot.
What about Trump? He has been bashing DeSantis repeatedly on Truth Social, his alternative platform to Twitter, for months, anticipating that the governor would enter the race. But these “Truths” are merely tactics. What kind of strategy does the former president look to employ?
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When it comes to Trump, one always must be careful not to overthink strategy. The man is an improviser and has shown himself to be a politically shrewd one at that. He likes to make things up as he goes along, and it can be difficult to identify a single plan of attack that he has stuck to for very long. Nevertheless, two themes have emerged from the Trump campaign to date that suggest how he intends to win back the Republican nomination.
First, Trump’s messaging strategy is strikingly reminiscent of the “bloody shirt” campaign of Republican candidates in the 30 years after the Civil War. The GOP had begun its political life in the 1850s as a boldly reformist “free soil” coalition dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery. The Union triumph in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery altogether robbed the party of its raison d’être, and after the war, the Republicans emphasized the idea of voting the way you shot. Republicans told northern voters that the Democrats were the secessionists, the rebels, the ones who murdered your sons, your fathers, your brothers. To vote for them would be to commit a crime against their memories. That was the essence of the bloody shirt.
Trump’s bloody shirt is not the Civil War, of course. It’s the 2020 election. Trump has maintained without equivocation that it was rigged against him. The implications of that are stark. If Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the presidency from Trump, it means that Trump should be the president right now. But he’s not, which means a crime has been committed against him. Republican voters are thus duty-bound to avenge this theft by renominating him. It does not matter if they may like DeSantis, Nikki Haley, or Tim Scott, this reasoning goes: They have an obligation to Trump, just as northerners had a duty to avenge the Union dead in the decades after the Civil War.
Likewise, Trump’s attacks on DeSantis have focused on the Florida governor’s disloyalty to him. Trump helped him win the GOP nomination for governor in 2018. Thus, in his mind, DeSantis must stand by Trump as the former president seeks justice.
Second, Trump seems to be working from the assumption that a critical mass of Republicans basically agrees with him. The party electorate believes deep in its bones that Trump had the presidency stolen from him and intends to give him a shot to recapture it. He already has the votes secured. He just has to wait until they are cast. Perhaps the best historical analogy here is not the late 19th century but the Middle Ages. Trump occupies what he believes is an impossibly strong castle that cannot be laid siege.
This helps explain a lot of otherwise peculiar behavior from the former president, who does not look like he is actually campaigning at all. This last week alone, DeSantis has been holding events all around the state of Iowa, which will host the first Republican contest. He also has a jampacked schedule with plenty of stops in New Hampshire and South Carolina. So do Scott and Haley, as well as Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence. Trump’s schedule, on the other hand, has been decidedly lackadaisical. His only major event in the entire month of May was a CNN town hall. Otherwise, he has not done much except golf and blast out “Truths.”
If Trump really thought he had to go out and persuade Republican voters to renominate him, he probably would not do that. Again, since it is Trump we’re dealing with, it’s impossible to know how closely he’ll hew to any strategy, but his inactivity to date has indicated a confidence that he has this battle locked down.
Is he correct? There is no doubt that the 2024 nomination is Trump’s to lose. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that he’s the favorite, quite another to declare him the prohibitive favorite. Indeed, the very entry of DeSantis into the race suggests that his position is not as strong as the former president would like people to believe. After all, the purpose of a large and imposing medieval castle was to disabuse rivals of the notion that it could be sieged. The point was to win the battle before it even began. And yet here is DeSantis, thinking he can indeed storm the gates.
In fact, the lines of attack DeSantis has taken since he launched his campaign suggest what the Florida governor thinks are the cracks in Trump’s edifice. Clearly, COVID-19 is at the top of the list. Republican voters do not blame Trump for the spread of the disease, but since he has left office, many of the policies that Trump adopted in 2020 are now anathema to Republicans. Trump encouraged lockdowns. He went all in on the vaccine. He embraced Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. Republican voters were more or less all right with these stances in the last presidential election, but over the last three years, the GOP electorate has come to view all of them as part of a coordinated attack by the administrative state on individual liberty. DeSantis is betting that he can convince GOP voters that Trump, in fact, was the architect of this assault.
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DeSantis is also embracing substance over style. Many Republican voters loved the chaos that Trump brought to Washington, D.C. They loved that the former president made his political enemies gnash their proverbial teeth. But if you spend any time talking to Republicans in the country, you’ll discover that just as many supported Trump despite the chaos, not because of it. These voters saw it as a bug, not a feature of his administration. DeSantis is not only positioning himself as the no-drama candidate, but he’s also asserting that it is his very lack of drama that delivers results. He knows how the government actually works, so he doesn’t need to lash out periodically on Twitter.
All told, the clash between Trump and DeSantis feels like the fourth quarter of an NFL game. The former president has the lead, DeSantis has the ball, and Trump has chosen to play the “prevent” defense. His goal seems to sit on the lead that he has and wager that DeSantis will not be able to make any big plays that turn the game around. Is this the right strategy? Only time will tell.
