When he formally launches his presidential bid this week, Ron DeSantis will finally have the chance to declare open war on Donald Trump.
It is an opportunity he will gladly turn down.
The brash and bellicose governor of Florida, the self-appointed «new sheriff in town» in his fight with Disney that boasts of sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, thrive on the slights of the enemy, and gleefully plunge headlong into the culture wars: scorched earth no more. At least not when it comes to Trump.
Instead, DeSantis will be judicious, or as his team says, «strategic» about crossing into Mar-a-Lago territory. The governor will mostly ignore Trump’s daily taunts and confront the former president head-on only in specific circumstances, particularly politics, according to three DeSantis political advisers.
The cautious approach is to the disappointment of Never Trumpers and Trump skeptics who thought they had found their own bully to proverbially punch Trump in the nose. But for DeSantis’ team, it’s just his political reality.
“If they want to hand the nomination over to Donald Trump, I suppose they can. But there is the reality that a lot of Trump supporters are Ron DeSantis fans and a lot of Ron DeSantis supporters are Trump fans, or at least they probably voted for the guy twice,» said a DeSantis aide who was not authorized to speak officially. about strategy. «Why make political math harder for yourself, unnecessarily?»
DeSantis is expected to officially jump into the White House race this week. When he does, he falls into the same trap as most of the gang that swarms around the Republican primary: He threatens the favorite, but ultimately throws the punches so as not to scare off the vital Trump voters they think they need to win the nomination. .
Vida Keller, legislative director for the state Republican Party in the battleground state of Nevada, said many Republican voters believe Trump helped DeSantis when he endorsed him for governor in his 2018 bid.
«I’ve actually heard people say, ‘If he’s going after Trump, he’s a traitor,'» Keller said of DeSantis. «It’s like, yeah, Trump was great when you needed him.»
It’s the Trump paradox: Trump can launch nuclear strikes against his enemies and get away unscathed, but if his opponents try the same thing, it’s a meltdown.
“I’ve seen very smart people think they’re going to crack Trump’s code. And they always fail. It allows them to be the worst versions of themselves,” said self-proclaimed “Trump anthropologist” Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican who helped launch the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
“Ron just doesn’t have the presence and brashness of Trump,” Wilson continued. «That’s part of [Trump’s] superpower, he just doesn’t care. He will just lie and lie and lie.”
DeSantis’s team acknowledges that he doesn’t know the alchemy behind derailing Trump, as well as being «nimble and smart» in reacting to the former president.
That’s why, until now, DeSantis’ Never Back Down super PAC has led the charge when it comes to being aggressive with Trump. That dynamic is expected to continue.
«The governor has never shied away from a fight, but he’s not one to be distracted by nonsense,» the adviser said.
And Trump has certainly tried to distract. For months, Trump has mounted a crusade against DeSantis; affiliated super PACs have invested millions of dollars in negative publicity and launched verbal and written attacks on the governor in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent DeSantis from running.
In fact, according to an analysisTrump-affiliated MAGA Inc.’s spending on anti-DeSantis ads so far this year has already surpassed everything the Trump group spent on Senate campaigns in the 2022 midterm elections.
“The more Trump can define DeSantis early on, that makes it much harder to get out of the hole down the road,” said Rob Pyers, who tracks campaign data and is director of research for the nonpartisan California Target Book, which analyzes race data in the state. At the same time, Pyers warned that if DeSantis fights Trump and makes the same arguments that other opponents have made in the past, «then he risks playing into Trump’s hands.»
A second adviser to DeSantis, who was not authorized to speak officially, argued that by going after DeSantis so hard, «Trump is alienating some people» in the party.
That’s why, the adviser said, DeSantis’ team will delve into what they see as their best contrasting arguments, including that the governor decisively won his re-election last fall while Trump lost in 2020, and in 2022, the candidates Trump endorsed had. a losing record. That eligibility argument also involves honing in on the theory that DeSantis would be more competitive against Biden.
A third outside adviser to DeSantis said the team anticipates Trump’s drive to be against who DeSantis is, and whatever he is against, will trip him up, and they plan to take advantage of those moments.
The adviser pointed to some comments by Trump that they considered missteps, such as saying that the six-week ban on abortion is “Too hard» and his take on the disney fightthat DeSantis’ team saw as siding with CEO Bob Iger.
The team is also expected to highlight that DeSantis can serve a full eight years if elected and Trump can’t. And the governor is expected to stand by his victory in Miami-Dade County — historically blue territory with a high percentage of Latino voters — as proof that he can win broad support even after all the backlash he received for sending migrant flights. to Martha’s. Vineyard, his tough approach to keeping Florida open during Covid or his wars with schools over transgender issues.
“Part of our goal is to win over a lot of Trump supporters,” DeSantis’s second aide said. «Given that, it makes more sense for us to highlight where DeSantis can be most effective.»
Paul Bentz, an Arizona-based Republican pollster, said DeSantis can’t go on offense because that would put the race on Trump.
At some point, though, DeSantis has to prove he can take on Trump, he said.
«You’re not going to be able to survive a primary or win a primary where you don’t recognize Trump and at least go after him in some way,» Bentz said.
For the most part, the DeSantis team ignores many of the mass-produced slights of Trump. “Ron DeSanctimonious gets caught in the mousetrap,” a Trump press release yelled last week after news broke that Disney was pulling the plug on a new Florida campus. «The culture of losing continues.»
“I think that alienates some people who are on the right or who are undecided,” the second aide said.
However, when directly confronted with politics, DeSantis responded.
At a press conference last week, DeSantis was asked about Trump’s comments that the six-week abortion bill DeSantis signed into law in Florida was «too harsh.»
“I think as a Florida resident, he didn’t give an answer,” DeSantis said of Trump. “I signed the bill, I was proud to do it. He will not answer if he would sign it or not ”.
He also responded in more dire circumstances, such as in February when Trump, in a Truth Social post, posted a photo purporting to show DeSantis with several young women and hinted that the governor was acting inappropriately.
“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting Joe Biden,” DeSantis said in response. «I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.»