Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at a Midland County Republican Party breakfast in Midland, Mich., on April 6. DeSantis visited the central Michigan community for a county GOP event Thursday before heading to speak at Hillsdale College.Kaytie Boomer | MLive.com/The Associated Press
What’s a onetime presidential heavyweight like Ron DeSantis to do?
There he was, only a few weeks ago, his White House prospects high, his profile robust, his potential nearly unlimited. He was teasing the political world – a potential Republican nominee with the Donald Trump muscle without the Trump madness. He wrote a memoir – the de rigueur preliminary step in a presidential drive since Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign – and was using his book-promotion tour as a pretext to travel to the early political testing grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire.
He planned to use the fallow time between spring break and Labour Day to polish his foreign-policy bona fides by going to Israel and giving a high-profile speech at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem, a venue whose name might wipe away some of the criticism of his Florida education policies.
His carefully sculpted plan was to lie back, bide his time, formally enter the fray at leisure and control the rhythm and the tempo of the race.
Not any more. Not any of it.
Mr. DeSantis is only the leading figure caught in the complications of the latest episode of the Donald Trump drama. Former vice-president Mike Pence, former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, senators Tim Scott of South Carolina and Rick Scott of Florida, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and others all feel the necessity of decrying this week’s 34-count indictment of Mr. Trump. By doing so, they are undercutting their own presidential prospects.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the very model of the Republican establishment and the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, disapproves of Mr. Trump as much as he disapproves of extramarital sex. But even he was moved to say that the bill of particulars against his nemesis was a “stretch.”
Now there’s so much dynamic stretching going on that American politics has become a form of Pilates, which, after all, requires strength, balance and flexibility.
New York district attorney Alvin Bragg Jr., vulnerable to accusations that his indictment was politically motivated, is facing a test of strength. Mr. Trump, whose postindictment performance at Mar-a-Lago was a medley of his greatest self-pitying hits, must prove that he is, to put it politely, balanced. And his competitors for the nomination, facing the need to master the political equivalent of performing a gymnastics right-leg split while giving an education-policy speech and dialling for campaign dollars, must find the flexibility to support him even as they oppose him.
Three exceptions may be Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and two former Republican governors whose own acrobatic twists on Mr. Trump set the political challenge in high relief.
One is Chris Christie of New Jersey, who endorsed Mr. Trump after his own 2016 campaign collapsed but who has emerged as a leading Trump critic as he contemplates a 2024 campaign. The other is Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who in the very week seven years ago that Mr. Christie expressed his support of his rival issued a statement saying, “The next generation of conservatives cannot allow Donald Trump to take everything we stand for and throw it away.” He eventually endorsed Mr. Trump, but this week called on the 45th president to withdraw from the 2024 race.
Never have presidential contenders been required to back an opponent for fear of being accused of stabbing him in the back.
How an indictment helps Donald Trump build his brand
In 1968, with a war on and American military personnel dying in Vietnam, Democratic presidential contenders senators Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Robert F. Kennedy of New York felt no compunction to issue expressions of support for president Lyndon B. Johnson, then still a candidate of their party for re-election.
“They were running against an incumbent president,” said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian who was a leading anti-war figure at the time and was arrested in protests at the chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “The Democratic bosses still supported Johnson, and in this case Trump still has support of a big chunk of Republicans. To defeat Trump, his challengers have to peel away some of his supporters.”
That was less of a challenge even a fortnight ago, when Republicans hadn’t yet lined up to support Mr. Trump against charges that party members consider mere accounting errors and that even some Democrats regard as flimsy – and far less potentially consequential than charges being weighed in Georgia, where Mr. Trump faces accusations of election tampering, and in Washington, where a special counsel, Jack Smith, is conducting an investigation into Mr. Trump’s role in retaining possession of secret government documents in Florida.
Now peeling away Trump supporters is more crucial than ever, especially since polls show there are more of them than there were last month. Team Trump knows that, which is why this week it circulated a memo to DeSantis contributors urging them to abandon the Governor and his “collapsing numbers” and join the Trump bandwagon.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released the day before Mr. Trump’s dramatic court appearance showed that 48 per cent of Republicans surveyed wanted him to be renominated, an increase of four percentage points in two weeks. Only 19 per cent wanted Mr. DeSantis to be their party’s nominee, a drop of 11 percentage points in the same period.
The pressure to express dutiful fealty to Mr. Trump may fade in the coming months, but it will not disappear. Mr. Trump still faces multiple legal battles and the next hearing in the New York trial involving the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels is set for Dec. 4, with a trial beginning in January, 2024. That’s the month the Iowa caucuses likely will begin.