Ron DeSantis’s campaign and its allied political action committee are telling us in no uncertain terms that they do not believe Donald Trump’s pathway to the Republican presidential nomination can be derailed. At least, that’s what the leaks out of the campaign suggest.
“There are four basic must-dos,” reads a pre-debate memo from a firm associated with DeSantis’s Never Back Down PAC, obtained by the New York Times. “1. Attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times. 2. State [DeSantis’s] positive vision 2-3 times. 3. Hammer Vivek Ramaswamy in a response. 4. Defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack.”
Let’s dwell for a minute on point four: “Defend Donald Trump.” The prohibitive front-runner in the race for the GOP nomination — a figure so dominant in Republican politics that he would have to suffer nothing less than a historic polling collapse for any of his competitors to have a shot at beating him — must be protected from criticism.
The strategy here isn’t hard to discern. DeSantis hopes to present himself to Republican voters as the most credible alternative to Trump but not a departure from Trump. Apparently, his allies believe executing that approach requires him to dispatch all other possible contenders for that title. Once the field is cleared of detritus, DeSantis can get down to the real work of peeling off Trump supporters. The only problem with this strategy would be if that day never comes.
This is all too eerily familiar to the strategy Trump’s opponents deployed against him in 2016 — a contest marked by solipsism and excess cleverness, the most visible outcome of which was to enrich a variety of well-placed campaign consultants. DeSantis’s campaign seems wholly committed to executing that failed strategy.
But maybe the DeSantis campaign doesn’t see any other viable course of action. According to the New Yorker‘s Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s reporting, DeSantis’s campaign vehicles tested “various anti-Trump messages” with voters and found that they were entirely ineffective. For example, when Republican voters were confronted with an anti-Covid-lockdown message, 70 percent agreed with that message. But when those same voters were asked to register their opinions on Trump’s Covid-related lockdowns, 70 percent of Republican voters flipped on a dime and expressed their undying admiration for lockdowns.
If GOP voters are so besotted with Trump that they will abandon elementary policy preferences like their opposition to lockdowns and will instead adapt their views so they comport with the former president’s, whatever his views happen to be in the moment, the race is not winnable. But here’s the thing: Ron DeSantis is in the race. He is running for the Republican nomination, and he has everything to lose.
The campaign DeSantis has so far ran is a disappointing one, but it’s not a disaster. Not yet, at least. But on this trajectory — one that culminates in a humiliating spectacle in which the only viable alternative to Trump prostrates himself before the awesome might of his cult — DeSantis will not have a political career to slink back to amid his retreat from the national stage. Newer, fresher, and far bolder figures will emerge to eclipse his waning political star in the years that follow 2024. If DeSantis thinks he can defer to Trump, absorb a respectable loss, and regroup for 2028, he should ask Ted Cruz how that’s going. Indeed, he can ask the head of his Never Back Down PAC, who is intimately familiar with every mortifying contour of that debacle.
The strategy the DeSantis campaign is reenacting in its quest to dethrone Trump from his perch at the top of the polls is one that seems destined to fail. But it won’t just fizzle; it will end in an abject humiliation from which there is no return. So, either go hard, leave it all on the field, earn yourself a fighting chance and lose with some dignity, or get out of the race. Stop wasting your donors’ money and our time. If no one but Chris Christie and his one-state campaign are going to take the fight to the front-runner, there is no point to this primary. Maybe we should just agree to put an end to its misery and ours.