Former President Donald Trump has been taking preemptive shots against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), comparing his most formidable 2024 primary foe to Republican leaders distrusted by the conservative base.
The beleaguered establishment figures with whom DeSantis has been linked include former House Speaker Paul Ryan, the Bush family, and Karl Rove.
Attacks on one pre-Trump Republican leader may still be a bridge too far for conservative true believers: Ronald Reagan.
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Republican operatives and conservative activists told the Washington Examiner it would be a mistake for the Trump campaign to keep up the Reagan-DeSantis comparisons.
“This is an endorsement, not an attack,” one Republican campaign professional said.
In a preview of Trump’s case against the Florida governor ahead of an expected GOP clash of the titans, Axios quoted a “Trump confidant” taking a shot at DeSantis’s populist bona fides by pointing to his Reaganite record.
“There’s a pre-Trump Ron and there’s a post-Trump Ron," the Trump associate said of DeSantis. "He used to be a Reagan Republican. That’s where he comes from. He's now awkwardly trying to square his views up with the populist nationalist feeling of that party."
Trump has been arguing that DeSantis is an establishment Trojan horse, imitating the former president’s combative personality, rhetoric, and populist issue positions while raking in the support of anti-Trump forces inside the GOP. If MAGA lets DeSantis into the city, the argument goes, Ryan, Rove, and Jeb Bush will jump out.
Some Republicans drawn to Trump would like to see him make a break from even older versions of the party. Reagan pursued free trade agreements and signed into law an immigration amnesty. He also symbolized the GOP’s commitment to free markets and limited government despite the growth of federal spending during his two terms, at a time when some on the Right would like to use state power from traditionalist or conservative ends.
First Things magazine published in 2019 published an open letter of sorts from conservative intellectuals titled “Against the Dead Consensus.” Signatories decried the “fetishizing of autonomy” ostensibly advanced by this excessively libertarian variant of conservatism.
“There is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016,” they wrote. “Any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right.”
Trump has adopted a version of this argument to distinguish himself from DeSantis and the rest of the likely Republican field. But the conservative consensus derided here is essentially a Reaganite one, with the First Things treatise concluding, “We respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism and foreclose honest debate.”
Some Trump fellow travelers have been known to deride “zombie Reaganism,” though it should be noted that Trump himself does not criticize Reagan. He occasionally favorably compares his own tax cuts and Supreme Court appointees to Reagan’s, but the 40th president is one of the few modern political leaders he tends to invoke favorably.
Republicans who spoke to the Washington Examiner were skeptical that what resonates with a relatively small band of Trump-aligned intellectuals will work with rank-and-file GOP voters.
“It’s like calling the pope too Catholic,” Republican strategist John Feehery said. “Calling DeSantis too Reaganesque is good for DeSantis, in my view. Remember that Reagan was the original outsider.”
DeSantis recently began his second term as governor of Florida after winning reelection by nearly 20 points. Reagan served two terms as governor of California before becoming president.
“I wrote an article last year comparing Trump to Nixon and DeSantis to Reagan,” Feehery continued. “I thought that was good for DeSantis. I never anticipated that somebody would think that comparing DeSantis to Reagan would be seen as a negative.”
Historian Craig Shirley, who has written multiple books about Reagan, went even further.
“Whoever said this would make a good car attendant for The View,” Shirley said of the person who dismissed DeSantis as a “Reagan Republican.” “And DeSantis should love to be thrown in this briar patch. Reagan and his principles won landslide campaigns twice getting more than 40% of the Democratic vote in some states.”
“Trump would do well to study Reagan’s smashing victories and throw the clown who said this onto the ash heap of history,” he added. “He doesn't know his history or politics.”
"We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open borders zealots and fools, but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush," Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, drawing the battle lines in the Republican primaries.
Other possible and declared Republican candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, have more forcefully distanced themselves from Trumpism even as they are mostly polite in their references to the former president.
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But DeSantis has tried to walk a middle ground of offering an alternative to Trump without discarding all of the former president's changes to the GOP brand.
“DeSantis should go out there and plead guilty, he is a Reagan Republican,” Shirley said. “This idiotic statement should go into the annals of stupid things said by political apparatchiks.”