Jeff offers some advice to any Republican presidential candidate who is trying to beat Donald Trump (and if you’re not trying to beat Trump, you’re not actually running for the job). The truth is that we don’t know what will work until it has been tried. We have a sample set of only one Republican primary campaign against Trump, and that was seven years ago, with a lot of water having gone under the bridge since then. Jeff’s thematic advice is not to pile onto arguments popular with liberals in the media — such as January 6 and Trump’s indictments — but instead to focus on policy criticisms of the many ways in which Trump ran his administration, or would run his next one, that conservative-leaning voters dislike. His stylistic advice is that you can’t beat Trump either by sucking up to him or trying to imitate him. It’s good advice.
On the latter point: Part of Trump’s appeal is that he campaigns with utter fearlessness. Experience has reinforced his natural tendency to think that he can’t get himself into any trouble that he can’t get out of, so even if he occasionally has to implicitly backtrack, he doesn’t sweat over having erred. You won’t beat Trump unless you can project a sense that you don’t fear him. In the context of debate, it will be important to avoid the Tim Pawlenty mistake (leveling criticisms you’re not willing to repeat to Trump’s face onstage), and to try, perhaps, to bait Trump into doing the same thing: When his campaign hits you from the left, make him own it.
The one thing that has not been tried before is a sustained, frontal assault on Trump from a conservative perspective. In 2016, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio waited too long to attack Trump, and their attacks were too scattershot. The one candidate who went after Trump early on was Rick Perry, but he started from a very weak position — he had run and lost in 2012, was never even in the top ten in the polls, didn’t qualify for the main debate stage, was out of money by the end of August, and was attacking Trump largely from the left on immigration.
Ron DeSantis (who at the moment is the only Republican who appears to have a plausible chance of beating Trump) is, obviously, able to make a case against Trump on policy — whether or not it proves persuasive — notably on Covid and law enforcement. I think it is worthwhile as well, although it is unlikely to be decisive, for DeSantis to make the case that Trump is too old, that he is politically damaged goods who will struggle to win a national election, that he will have trouble getting good people to work for him after all the bridges he has burned, and that, even if elected, Trump would be able to serve only one term.
The crucial advantage of these arguments, and of hitting Trump on Covid, is that they don’t require asking Trump voters to admit to themselves that they picked the wrong man in past elections. It’s far more effective for DeSantis to campaign on turning the page to a new generation rather than on relitigating past arguments over Trump. That may be morally unsatisfying, but Ronald Reagan didn’t win in 1980 by relitigating Watergate, and everybody who ran in the Democratic primary in 2020 against Obamacare lost to Obama’s vice president.