Donald Trump is trying to hang on as the doddering boss of the Republican Party. Earlier this month, he threatened that his supporters may stay home in 2022 and 2024 unless others in the GOP validate his delusion that he beat Joe Biden.
Were the GOP base less easily duped, it would move on, as when George H. W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney lost White House bids. As president, Trump failed to build his border wall or bring home the troops. No 75-year-old candidate who lost the popular vote to general-election opponents as weak as Hillary Clinton and Biden portends future glory for his party. And Trump energizes intense opposition like no one else, uniting otherwise divided Democrats while alienating a faction of conservatives and independents who normally vote Republican. As if that weren’t enough, America would be weaker with him as president because he tears us apart.
Nevertheless, Trump remains more popular among the shrinking Republican base than anyone else. So in publications including National Review, The Dispatch, and The Bulwark, anti-Trump conservatives are now debating what to do. They all view the 45th president as an unacceptable leader, deplore the Trumpist turn in the GOP, and lament the dearth of promising strategies for reversing it. Alongside the options they’re considering, I’d add one more: uniting behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the GOP rising star who can boast both conventional political achievements and credibility on the Trumpist right. By failing to unite around any candidate in 2016, Trump’s opponents all but guaranteed that the celebrity businessman would coast to the nomination. In 2024, DeSantis may not be the president that Never Trumpers would choose. He’s too Trumpy for their taste. But their options are limited, and if beating Trump is their highest priority, as I think it should be, DeSantis may be their best bet.
DeSantis frustrates and disappoints me within normal parameters. He hasn’t yet frightened me, as Trump does, as being superlatively incompetent, divisive, morally degenerate, or authoritarian. As MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough put it last June, when COVID-19 numbers were failing and DeSantis was peaking in the polls, “We’re going from the political heroin to the political methadone.” However bleak the analogy, that’s a significant step toward recovery!
At just 43 years old, DeSantis offers a sharp contrast with both Trump and Biden, two of our oldest presidents. The Florida governor grew up middle class: His father installed Nielsen TV-ratings boxes, and his mother was a nurse. He graduated from Yale and Harvard Law, served in the Navy from 2004 to 2010 as a JAG officer, worked as a federal prosecutor in Florida, then ran for Congress in 2012, where he was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and opposed funding the Robert Mueller investigation, arguing that the Department of Justice’s approach “didn’t identify a crime to be…
Read More: Ron DeSantis Is Never Trumpers’ Best Hope of Beating Trump