United States: Trump-DeSantis, bloody duel on the horizon

How to recognize a politician who dreams of becoming president? Answer one: significant weight loss, like Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s former Secretary of State who lost 40 pounds in six months and is considering running for the White House. Answer two: at the launch of a book. That of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, which has everything of a campaign program, is called The Courage to be Free : Florida’s Blueprint for America (The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Plan for America). He has just promoted it in Texas and California, the two most populous states in the United States, during his first major tour outside the borders of his state.

If he has not officially declared his candidacy for the White House, everything indicates that he is about to do so. “DeSantis is hypermethodical, notes the historian of the United States and the Republican Party Françoise Coste. Everything he does is calculated. His timing is perfect. He unfolds his battle plan, step by step.” The exact opposite, in short, of the Trump “method” based on improvisation, bloodshed and creative disorder.

To block the way for Joe Biden (or any other Democratic candidate), many are therefore betting on a DeSantis with an impeccable pedigree. Son of a television installer and a nurse, Yale and Harvard graduate, former star of his university’s baseball team, he is also a medalist in the war in Iraq, where he was a legal adviser special forces Navy Seals [NDLR : il devait veiller au respect des lois de la guerre]. In 2006, the man who is now a US Navy reservist also served in Guantánamo prison as a military lawyer, still within the army’s legal service, the US Army JAG corps (for Corps of the judge advocates general). This contrasts sharply with the record of service of Trump… who had been discharged to avoid being sent to Vietnam.

Narrowly elected in 2018 at the head of the “Sunshine state” with the support of Trump, the 44-year-old governor was re-elected in November with 19 points ahead of his Democratic opponent, this time without having sought the support of the billionaire 76-year-old New Yorker, who took umbrage. The triumph of the Floridian made him reach the status of the best hope of the Republican Party for 2024. Because many are those who, on the right, would like to draw a line under the Trump era. “The latter can win the Republican primaries but he is not in a position to win the presidential election against a Democratic opponent; the rejection he arouses is in the country is too great,” said conservative analyst Matt Mackowiak, who chairs the Potomac Strategy Group, based in Washington and Texas.

“DeSantis ticks all the boxes”

And that’s not all. A father of three, ages 2, 6, and 8, DeSantis is the ideal type. “It’s the ideal family that makes you think of the Kennedys,” enthuses, in Palm Beach (California), a friend of Donald Trump who admires Ron DeSantis, who had supported his wife Casey during her breast cancer. And she insists: “He really ticks all the boxes.”

But how to oppose Trump without alienating the MAGA base (Make America Greta Again) of the party, essential to win the primaries? Not easy at a time when the former president multiplies the insults against the governor, alternately nicknamed “Ron DeSanctimonious” (Ron the moralizer) or “Meatball Ron” (Bouboule Ron). “Donald Trump does not judge people based on their merit but based on their allegiance to him, continues analyst Matt Mackowiak. And he considers DeSantis to be disloyal to him.”

Since he became aware of the ambitions of the Governor of Florida, the former TV host of The Apprentice redoubles insults and threats, going so far as to promise revelations about DeSantis which, he specifies, “will astonish even his wife”! He remains unfazed. Master of his emotions, he takes the height and, crime of lèse-majesté, sovereignly ignores his neighbor of Mar-a-Lago (the name of the palace of Trump, in Florida). “These two are like two scorpions in a glass bottle”, slips, sarcastically, an executive of the Nixon Foundation, in California.

But who will kill the other? In 2016, the future president had benefited from favorable circumstances thanks to the multiplication of candidacies. Supported by a solid base of aficionados, he had eliminated his rivals one after another, including the governor of Florida at the time, a certain Jeb Bush. It is precisely this scattering of votes that the party’s anti-Trumps would like to avoid. A duel between Trump and DeSantis, or at least a reduced number of competitors, would unite the opponents of the ex-president.

“Cultural war” against “Wokism”

This explains why former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has just announced that he is giving up on running in 2024. As for the other official or supposed candidates (the ex-Trump ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, the former Vice -President Mike Pence, former Trump Foreign Secretary Mike Pompeo…), they are way behind DeSantis in the polls who, by the way, is a much better speaker. Abrasive and sarcastic, he does not hesitate to humiliate his opponents if he deems it necessary. It remains to be seen how he will resist hurricane Donald Trump during the Republican primary debates next fall, knowing that facing this “stage beast” is never an easy task.

In the meantime, the Floridian is refining his rhetoric, which is as simple as it is effective. On the one hand, he praises his good record at the head of the “Sunshine state”: economic dynamism, electoral success, low taxation, strong attractiveness. On the other hand, he is waging a “culture war” against “wokism”. In the line of sight: the textbooks and the libraries of Florida, which it purges of references to the past slavery and sex education. “No porn in school!” outrageously proclaims the governor of this southern state, who is having school textbooks rewritten in order to shove the history of slavery in his state under the rug.

DeSantis also pulls the anti-immigration lever. With his colleague from Texas Greg Abbott, he has already made a name for himself on a national scale by organizing charters of illegal immigrants sent to Democratic states, in front of the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington or even at Martha’s Vineyard. , the summer residence of the jet set and American presidents (Obama owns a resort there). It is a question of confronting progressives with their contradictions by cynically using migrants as pawns in a debate that is being played out on [la chaîne conservatrice] FoxNews.

“Beyond that, we don’t know anything about his program, notes historian Françoise Coste. He offers nothing on the economy, the environment or foreign policy and does not comment on the war in Ukraine. Everything it is intentional, calculated. DeSantis knows that anti-woke and anti-immigration speeches are the only ones likely to mobilize Republican voters in the primaries.” After beating Trump, there will always be time to talk about the economy or international affairs.