It is going to be exciting for Republicans. I think I have figured out Donald Trump’s strategy.
Trump has prosecutors and lawyers up and down the Eastern Seaboard after him. He has the DA in New York City in the Stormy Daniels case. He has a special federal prosecutor in the Jan. 6 and documents cases. He has the DA in Atlanta in the election case. He has the attorney general of New York going after his business practices. He has E. Jean Carroll in a defamation case around an alleged sexual assault decades ago. These are the major cases, some criminal some civil.
There are a bunch of other cases. There is a wikipedia page.
The solution to all this is for Trump to be re-elected in November 2024. That would stop the clock on most if not all of this for four years.
I think Trump wants to be elected president again for a bunch of reasons. His nose is badly out of joint for being beaten by Joe Biden. That was a big take-down. Trump probably still can’t believe it happened, because Biden was not exactly a ball of fire. But in truth, in November 2020, the choice was between Trump and Anyone Other Than Trump. It was a referendum on Trump. Biden just happened to be on the ballot. No one said I have carefully evaluated both candidates and, it’s a push, but I’m going for Biden. No, they said, I can’t stand one more minute of Trump. Or I love Trump. Or I hate all Democrats. It wasn’t about Biden.
So Trump wants to get back in the White House so he doesn’t have to live with the 2020 result. And, incidentally, to get back at a lot of people.
But the larger issue, I think, is that he is in serious legal trouble on a lot of fronts, like nothing he has ever seen before. He has had a litigious life, but this is much, much worse.
For Republicans, this is a heck of a thing. Trump may be under three separate local and federal indictments when the primaries start next winter. He may be in a New York courtroom facing the attorney general of New York. He may be in an incredibly nasty defamation trial. He may be in court every other day. And yet he will be asking Republican voters to vote for him in primaries all over the country, every week, for the six months of next year.
We have literally never seen anything remotely close to this, and most countries haven’t. This is a one-off.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis looks to be the only person on the Republican side who can derail Trump. But DeSantis has never run outside Florida. He has never run a national campaign. Everyone who says what a strong candidate DeSantis is should pause a bit, because he really, truly has never faced tough pitching. He barely won his first gubernatorial election against a rather weak candidate, and then he won re-election against another weak candidate. He has never faced an opponent like Trump, who can be brutal.
It is hard enough to run a national primary gauntlet in a presidential campaign against typical candiates. It is another thing to run your first national campaign when someone like Trump is throwing hand grenades at you every day, five times a day. DeSantis has been pretty effective pushing around folks like Disney, who don’t fight back. Let’s see how he does with Trump. He has two options: He can try to ignore him, or he can fight back. But I think it is going to be tought to ignore Trump. He will just keep coming.
The other problem DeSantis has is the problem that all candidates have who are running their first national campaign. Even though he has gotten a fair amount of attention as governor of Florida, he really hasn’t had a real, thorough vetting. Whatever vetting he has had has been in the Florida newspapers, which probably did what they could. Now he will face major-league vetting, from outfits like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the networks, to name a few. They will look at everything. They will talk to everyone. This is sometimes surprising for first-time national candidates. DeSantis may think that because he got a once-over from the Miami Herald or the Tampa Bay Times, that he has been through this. He hasn’t, really. They might have assigned a couple of reporters to nose around. The Times can put 10 people on it, full-time, for the next year. Twenty, if need be. I’m sure this has already started. I’m sure the tips have already been coming in from Florida about this or that that the Times should look into. I’m sure the Trump people are helpfully providing some of those tips.
So we don’t know about DeSantis.
And if DeSantis doesn’t stop Trump in the early primaries, there’s no one else, really. There is no one else who can prevent Trump from being renominated.
If I had to bet a lot of money, I would bet on Trump getting the nomination again, unless DeSantis decides to go at him frontally. Right now, even with all his legal troubles or possibly because of them, Trump’s base in the Republican Party is solid. Don’t be fooled when a paper quotes this county chairman or that donor tut-tutting about Trump. He’s solid. DeSantis also has good standing in the party. Potentially, he could use that to make the case why Trump would be a bad nominee. To do that, he has to do more than say it is time to move on, or something like that. He has to speak directly to Trump’s base and explain why Trump as nominee is a bad idea. He has to convince them that Trump will lose in 2024 for the same reasons that he lost in 2020, that he has alienated everyone that is not in his base. This is a hard argument to make, because it requires DeSantis to say, “Look, there are people who are not liberal, woke Democrats who are never going to vote for Trump again, no matter how much you love him. Whether you like it or not, we need those people if we are going to get back in the White House. We cannot win with just Trump supporters, not in the battleground states. That is the math. I can speak to that 5 or 10 percent of the voters who will stay home or vote for Biden if we nominate Trump. I believe in the things Trump believes in and you believe in, but I can make a more convincing case. All you will do if you nominate Trump is hand the White House and likely the House and the Senate to the Democrats. The people who gave Trump the benefit of the doubt in 2016 are gone.”
I have a lot of doubt as to whether DeSantis will do that. I think his notion is that if he avoids mixing it up with Trump and just goes around and gives speeches, that Republicans will obviously vote for him in the primaries. I don’t believe that. People vote for Trump to give a big middle finger to people they don’t like. DeSantis doesn’t give them that thrill.