Donald Trump versus Ron DeSantis is not a fight between Trumpism and normalcy, but between Trumpism and its evolution.
former President Donald Trump will announce his candidacy for the presidency in 2024 — the Fort Sumter moment in the Republican Party’s looming civil war. On the one side, Trump and his hardcore supporters; on the other, a Republican establishment that’s doing its damnedest to prop up Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a viable alternative in 2024.
That’s the narrative that’s sprung up in the political press since the midterms, at any rate, and for good reason. It really does appear that the Republican establishment is tired of Trump and are using the midterms as a pretext to try to topple him from the party throne.
Yet this framing also skates over something important: that a DeSantis victory in 2024 would not, in any sense, represent a return to Republican pre-Trump normalcy or the triumph of the “traditional GOP,” as some observers see it.
The Florida governor, who won a blowout victory in his reelection bid last week, is not a Republican cut from the Bush-Cheney-Romney cloth. He represents an evolution of Trumpism, a new way of channeling the illiberal populist forces unleashed by the former president’s rise to power in 2016.
His ascendancy as Trump’s principal challenger represents not the return of the GOP establishment, but its adaptation to the insurgency that defeated it six years ago. His model is less John McCain or Mitt Romney, the last two GOP nominees before Trump, than Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a leader who, after being elected in 2010, proceeded to use his right-wing populist ideology as a cover for authoritarian power grabs.
This is not to say that Trump and DeSantis are identical. In fact, they represent two related but distinct versions of American right-wing populism: Trump its wild id, DeSantis its more calculating and intellectualized ego. If one looks closely at which prominent conservatives and media voices are backing which candidate, these subtle distinctions become clearer — pointing to the different ways that these two figures threaten liberal-democratic norms.
These distinctions are real, important, and, as an intellectual matter, quite interesting. But they should not obscure what this matchup really represents.
DeSantis versus Trump is not normalcy versus radicalism. It’s American Orbánism versus the berserk.DeSantis became Trump’s chief rival because of their similarities, not differences
Tuesday’s election results, where DeSantis and fellow Florida Republicans won handily while Trump-backed candidates floundered across the country, created the conditions for a clash between the two men. Somewhat ironically, DeSantis owes his current prominence to a Trump endorsement in the last midterm elections.
Back then, Ron DeSantis was a Congress member with little national profile, fresh off the heels of an abortive primary challenge to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in the 2016 cycle. Running for governor in 2018, DeSantis positioned himself as the Trumpy choice in the race — an insurgent challenger aiming to unseat the GOP establishment’s choice, then-Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. He sought, and received, loud public backing from the president.
“Congressman Ron DeSantis is a brilliant young leader … He loves our Country and is a true FIGHTER!,” Trump tweeted in December 2017. At campaign rallies, DeSantis would read Trump’s tweet verbatim on stage.
When DeSantis triumphed, despite being considerably outspent by Putnam, national media covered it as one of several examples of the Trumpian wave sweeping the Republican Party. “Trump strengthens grip on the GOP as Ron DeSantis triumphs in Florida governor primary,” went a representative headline published by NBC News. It was obvious to most that DeSantis was Trump’s disciple: one of many mini-Trumps around the country, attempting to ride the populist energy that had propelled Trump to the GOP’s commanding heights.
DeSantis’s facility for playing the Trumpist game — his seemingly unique ability to be almost more Trumpy than Trump himself — is a key part of why he’s emerged as the former president’s chief rival today.
At the height of the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, the Florida governor capitalized on Republican rage against masking, school closures, and restrictions on gathering — keeping Florida as open as he could, positioning the state as what he would later describe as “a refuge of sanity when the world went mad.” The wisdom of these policies is tricky to suss out, even in hindsight: the available data suggests Florida’s approach may indeed have produced a swifter economic recovery, but at the cost of more Covid-19 deaths (particularly among young people). The data on whether the decision to reopen schools earlier helped keep learning loss down appears mixed.
DeSantis’s stance on vaccination is both more radical and less substantively defensible. After the rollout, he evolved into the highest-profile Republican official to court support from anti-vaxxers — falsely saying that “risks outweigh the benefits” when it comes to vaccinating kids under 5, and appointing a surgeon general who has discouraged men under 40 from getting MRNA vaccines. In this, he outflanked even Trump, who has long attempted to claim credit for vaccine development via Operation Warp Speed.
That DeSantis’s Covid approach prompted howls of outrage from liberals and public health officials was a feature, not a bug.
