As election looms, the most consequential Republican battle is Ron DeSantis vs. Trump
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“Someday, I think you and I are going to have a serious disagreement.”
– Daniel Day-Lewis (Hawkeye) in “The Last of the Mohicans”
* * *
Vanity Fair writer Gabriel Sherman reported on Wednesday that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won’t challenge Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, according to his unnamed GOP sources.
“He’s led (donors) to believe he will not run if Trump does,” wrote Sherman, describing his discussion with a source “briefed on donor conversations.”
If that’s true, DeSantis should hang it up.
Now.
Because his time is not tomorrow. It’s not 2028. It’s today. And he needs to do what America requires:
He needs to deck Donald Trump.
DeSantis turned a battleground Florida red
I don’t believe the Vanity Fair story. I think DeSantis is going to announce sometime in the next six months that he will run for president. I believe he’ll defeat Trump for the nomination and go on to win the White House.
I believe that because I watch Democrats, and they figured out more than a year ago that DeSantis is one of the most formidable political leaders of our time.
The Florida governor is real trouble. And they know it.
On the trail: Blake Masters, Kari Lake praise DeSantis at Phoenix rally
In three years, DeSantis has transformed Florida from a swing state into a deep-red Republican juggernaut, a movement he calls the “The Free State of Florida.”
His reelection on Tuesday is not in doubt. On Sunday he was up 11.5 points in the Real Clear Politics average.
Understand, it’s one thing for a Republican to win like that in Idaho or Alabama, but Florida has been a battleground state for decades. It’s long been said that a 2-point win in Florida is a landslide.
DeSantis has planted the Republican flag in the Sunshine State and it is a swing state no more.
Donald Trump smells a potential rival
The other person who knows DeSantis is real trouble is Donald Trump.
This past weekend, when the figurehead of the Republican Party should have been closing for Republican candidates, Trump was nursing his twin obsessions:
Himself and Ron DeSantis.
In a rally outside of Pittsburgh, three days before Election Day, he spent two hours gushing about himself and strongly hinting at his next run for president. He spent two seconds calling the governor of Florida “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
A day later in Miami, he smacked DeSantis with this backhanded prediction:
“The people of Florida are going to reelect the wonderful, the great friend of mine, Marco Rubio, to the United States Senate, and you’re going to reelect Ron DeSantis as your governor.”
Somewhere DeSantis is laughing.
Because Trump has been doing this for more than a year, taking shots either by himself or through surrogates at DeSantis. Trump and his juvenile delinquent ally Roger Stone have called DeSantis fat, boring, disloyal and a piece of excrement.
And DeSantis has answered in the cruelest way one can answer trolls. He’s ignored them.
No wonder Democrats are rooting for Trump
Those who can’t ignore this are Democrats and their friends. Trump’s weekend attacks on DeSantis made them giddy. After two impeachments and a Capitol riot they find themselves rooting for Donald Trump.
“There are certain things for which Trump has an undeniable, diabolical genius,” tweeted David Axelrod, formerly the senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “One is branding his opponents with pejorative nicknames that pinpoint their vulnerabilities. He proudly rolled another out yesterday: ‘Ron DeSanctimonious.’ ”
Rick Wilson, one of the political hacks who founded the Lincoln Project, now a mutant arm of the Democratic Party, tweeted, “Ron DeSantis is the leading anti-Trump candidate. How’s that worked out in the past? He won’t get to skate the line. He’s not that mentally agile when even a spent force like Crist can knock him for a loop in a debate.”
Oh, really?
Charlie Crist, the Democratic challenger for Florida governor, knocked DeSantis for a loop?
DeSantis, unlike Trump, is a serious man
Set your watch.
At 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Crist will be back in his well-trod pasture chewing the cud.
The Democrats and national liberal media have expended an ocean of ink describing DeSantis as the next even-more-scary sequel to Trump.
They’re right to be scared.
DeSantis’ great strength is that he isn’t Trump. He doesn’t do the pratfalls Trump does every third word. He doesn’t do what Trump does with gusto – make more enemies than friends.
He stands in perfect contrast to Trump because he is the one thing Trump can never be – a serious man.
DeSantis needs to run for president in 2024 because America needs a serious person in the White House. And to get there it needs legitimate choices from both the Republican and Democratic parties.
We have China, Putin and a recession to worry about
We need good choices because trouble is on the horizon.
Chinese strongman Xi Xinping is making himself president for life and turning China into a much larger and looming threat to the West.
In the recent Communist Party congress, he spoke ominously that the United States is working to subvert China’s rise.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened nuclear war with such fervor that President Joe Biden says we are facing a nuclear threat unseen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Our financial titans are predicting a recession sometime in 2023 that combined with grudging inflation could become an economic “hurricane,” says Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase & Co.
“We’re in deep trouble,” billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said in September. “I will not be surprised if (the recession) is not larger than the so-called average garden variety. I don’t rule out something really bad.”
Republicans are not going to elect Donald Trump to manage these crises.
Trump can't respond. DeSantis proves he can
They will nominate the governor who just expertly managed the aftermath of the deadliest storm to hit Florida in nine decades. Ron DeSantis marshaled all of the forces of recovery – the rescue crews, the convoy of utility trucks, the delivery of food and bottled water, the money for rebuilding – with such energy and competence that Florida residents marveled.
The only thing his detractors could knock him on were his snow-white shrimp boots, a look that comes off a bit less goofy on the Gulf Coast than the rest of the country.
In what was a critical profile of DeSantis, The liberal New Yorker magazine illuminated so many of DeSantis’ admirable qualities that the conservative National Review exulted in its own column, “The New Yorker Accidentally Makes Ron DeSantis Look Awesome”.
While Trump was fumbling many of his own COVID-19 briefings, Gov. Ron DeSantis was doing that most un-Trump of things, according to the New Yorker.
He was reading.
“The Governor’s aides say that he was intent on his own research, poring over scientific data and medical journals. He also began to consult a small circle of experts from out of state, who saw the virus as essentially uncontrollable. In April, 2020, he began lifting the statewide lockdown – in keeping, he said, with guidelines set forth by Trump’s White House.
“The former political adviser with knowledge of the COVID response told me that DeSantis sympathized with the state’s working class, who weren’t able to work remotely and typically didn’t have much in savings. ‘The people who were criticizing the Governor for keeping everything open tended to be people who had the luxury of working at home,’ he said.”
One day, DeSantis will put Trump in his place
New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins wrote, among other things, that “DeSantis has an intense work ethic, a formidable intelligence and a granular understanding of policy.”
You would expect such from someone who parlayed his Yale undergraduate degree into a Harvard Law degree into a job as a U.S. Navy judge advocate general or JAG.
But DeSantis’ real genius is his delivery. He brings none of the elegant stylings of New Haven and Cambridge to Tallahassee.
His language is plain and unadorned. And a Harvard man who wears shrimp boots is not putting on airs.
DeSantis leads with facts and that will separate him from Donald Trump, who leads with emotion and raw impulse, and who will arrive at the 2024 Republican primary with a cargo ship worth of baggage.
Today DeSantis ignores the former president’s insults and slights. But one day he’ll have serious disagreement with him and put him in his place – a rocking chair at Mar-a-Lago.
The Republican Party has a Trump problem. Two years ago, Trump provoked a march on the U.S. Capitol that ended in disaster. He undercut two Republican candidates in Georgia and handed the U.S. Senate to the Democrats.
Now he is criticizing a key Republican governor days before an election.
DeSantis needs to run for president in 2024 because the American right, not the left, has to finally vanquish Donald Trump.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Ron DeSantis may be the only Republican who can defeat Trump
