Trump Believes DeSantis Doesn't Have What It Takes To Stand Up To His Bullying Tactics... We'll See

There were 5 public surveys I saw this week polling the GOP presidential primary. They were all basically bad news for Meatball Ron. Trump has recaptured the momentum and is ahead of him everywhere… even if Biden has a better chance to defeat Trump than DeSantis. Fox’s nationwide poll came out Sunday and showed Trump with 43% to DeSantis’ 28% (with Haley and Pence with 7% each, no one else above 2%). The following day OH Predictive came out with a poll of Arizona Republicans, showing Trump leading DeSantis 42-26% (with Pence at 8%, Haley and Liz Cheney each at 5%). The next day, Emerson released a national poll of Republican primary voters with Trump at 55%, DeSantos at 25%, Pence at 8% and Haley at 5%. The same day, the YouGov national poll for Yahoo showed Trump, among registered Republicans, with 47% to DeSantis’ 29%. And on Thursday, Roanoke College showed Virginia Republicans are also on Team Trump. Trump is at 39%, DeSantis at 28%, Glenn Youngkin at 6%, Nikki Haley at 5% and then Trump, Jr, and Mike Pence tied at 3%.

Yesterday, Mike Allen and Josh Kraushaar claimed a scoop by reporting that Trump, encouraged by the polling, intends to step up his attacks on DeSantis, including the childish name-calling, which has proven very effective among super low-intelligence Republican voters. “Trump hopes to scare DeSantis out of running, or at least damage him if he follows through on signs he will enter the race. Trump plans to target ‘Ron DeSanctimonious,’ as he delights in branding the governor, in five areas. They are:

1. DeSantis' past support for changes to Social Security and Medicare, including votes as a U.S. congressman to raise the eligibility age for Medicare.

2. Disloyalty to Trump after he helped DeSantis get elected governor in 2018. Trump also plans to pound DeSantis on likability.

3. Trump wants to cast DeSantis as a lackey of former House Speaker Paul Ryan. On Trump's social-media site, Truth Social, he attacked Ryan this week as a loser who "couldn't get elected dogcatcher," and said he should resign or be fired as a Fox Corp. board member.

4. DeSantis' response to COVID is a top Trump target, even though the governor is known for resisting mask mandates. Trump plans to attack DeSantis' caution in the earliest days of the pandemic — and try to fight the issue to a draw. A March 2020 headline in the Tampa Bay Times said: "DeSantis orders major shutdown of beaches, businesses in Broward, Palm Beach." (DeSantis pushes back on this.)

5. DeSantis took heat for muddled comments, in a Fox News interview last week, about whether to maintain financial and military support for Ukraine. Trump plans to portray DeSantis as wishy-washy on the war, while he toes the MAGA line of cutting aid.

Traditionally, many Republicans have favored privatization of Social Security and Medicare and cuts to both programs. But the MAGA base diverges from the traditional GOP base on this and Trump is ripping open that festering wound. It could poison the well for DeSantis if he does win the nomination. Politico reported yesterday that "about a third of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters still consider themselves supporters more of Trump than the Republican Party, according to a recent NBC News poll. Many of them aren’t going anywhere. Fully 28 percent of Republican primary voters are so devoted to the former president that they said they’d support him even if he ran as an independent, according to a national survey last month from The Bulwark and longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres. Indeed, the 'Always Trump' component of the party is so pronounced that it’s affecting how Trump’s opponents operate around him." Ironically, no one really expects Trump to try to protect any social safety net programs if he gets back into the White House and is just exploiting an obvious DeSantis vulnerabilty that Democrats are watching carefully.

Allen and Kraushaar wrote that “Team DeSantis believes it's smart to not respond directly to Trump's attacks. But waiting to respond could be risky— and undermine DeSantis' efforts to cast himself as a tough, principled alternative to the former president… DeSantis told Fox News' Jesse Watters this week that he sees Trump attacks as ‘background noise,’”

Yesterday, Andrew Desiderio and John Bresnahan made a weak case for Tim Scott, who has virtually no support outside of Capitol Hill. They concluded that a “Perhaps Scott’s toughest challenge is that with Trump and DeSantis dominating the headlines, he may be seen in Republican circles as more as a potential vice president than the top of the ticket. With Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence— another potential 2024 candidate— going in different directions, Scott would be an intriguing choice as the former president’s running mate, were Trump to secure the nomination. Scott has taken pains to avoid criticizing Trump in media interviews… [T]here are a number of Scott’s current colleagues who are convinced he can win the GOP nomination, even with Trump and DeSantis in the race. ‘Tim can win. He can win the presidency,’ said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), another Trump critic. ‘The former president, his day is past. We lost the House, we lost the presidency, and his candidates lost us the Senate. So if we want to win, we need somebody who can win.’ When asked whether DeSantis could win the White House, Cassidy responded: ‘I don’t know about that, but I think Tim Scott can.’ Scott, for his part, has barely talked to the press in the Capitol since last summer, preferring TV interviews with friendly hosts or conservative media outlets, another sign of a potential presidential run. ‘I think very highly of Tim Scott,’ Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said. ‘I’m not going to presume to speak for my colleagues. But he is very bright, experienced, and has an inspiring life story. And I think– along with Nikki Haley and Chris Christie– we’ve got a lot of potentially good choices.’” What the hell is she on?

There Is Something That Could Save Meatball Ron

Vice reported yesterday that the high profile investigations into Trump’s criminal behavior could upstage his campaign rallies in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Legal threats are moving faster than the political calendar. The biggest action of the next few months won’t take place on the campaign trail, but in the hushed conference rooms of District Attorneys and the Department of Justice, where prosecutors will decide whether to indict the former president. Three separate groups of prosecutors are preparing to make charging determinations within the next few months, ahead of next year’s GOP primaries. Many independent legal experts now think Trump’s indictment looks like a matter of time— including some who were once highly skeptical Trump would ever be charged… Would criminal charges actually hurt Trump’s chances at winning the GOP nomination, or will his ride-or-die supporters stick with him?”

There was a time when being charged with a felony would have blocked any candidate’s path to the White House, but Trump’s proven ability to survive endless scandals debunked the idea that a criminal indictment would derail his campaign.

There’s no legal reason why Trump would have to step aside after receiving an indictment, or even if he’s later convicted at trial and sentenced to prison. The Constitution gives only three criteria for winning the presidency— you must be at least 35 years old, a natural-born citizen, and a resident in the U.S. for 14 years. Technically, Trump could even win the presidency from inside prison.

…“When he’s held accountable, it can be a motivator for his base,” Norm Eisen, who served as co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment and trial of President Donald Trump in 2020, told VICE News.

Only about 10% of Republicans supported Trump’s first impeachment, for threatening to withhold defensive weapons from Ukraine unless its leaders dug up dirt on President Joe Biden. After the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, there was a brief dip in GOP support for Trump— but they rallied against his second impeachment in early 2021 and bear-hugged his claims the election had been stolen from him afterwards.

“We actually saw his popularity rise with his core supporters at certain points during the impeachment,” Eisen told Vice News.

During the midterms in 2022, Republican voters overwhelmingly backed Trump’s election-denying nominees for office— while booting out almost every GOP member of Congress who backed Trump’s second impeachment. [That’s absurd— only Liz Cheney, Tom Rice, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Peter Meijer were defeated. Dan Newhouse and David Valadao were reelected. Anthony Gonzalez, John Katko, Fred Upton and Adam Kinzinger retired.]

And the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid last summer actually boosted Trump’s support among Republican voters, according to polls.

He’s shown that he can effectively rally his base against law enforcement officials by casting their probes as pure politics.

The former president has already spent months painting the prosecutors who are now poised to indict him as bogeymen to his rightwing base. Willis— a Black woman, Democrat, and daughter of a Black Panther— hails from liberal Atlanta, a city Trump and Republicans love to hate.

…Trump spent his entire presidency convincing his supporters that the FBI is part of the “deep state” that’s out to get him, priming them to see any prosecution as a politically motivated witch hunt. And he’s started to do the same with his current foes.

“These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They're racists and they're very sick, they're mentally sick,” Trump told a rally last year, before adding: “In reality, they're not after me. They're after you.”

“His base is conditioned to believe that any legal action against him is from the nefarious ‘Deep State,’” said Rick Wilson, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who cofounded the Lincoln Project.

“They’re going to say ‘they’re just doing this to get Trump,’” Wilson told Vice News. “The base will look at it as a badge of honor. They will not respond the way ordinary voters would have responded at any point in our prior history.”

But while a large number of Republicans seem fine with Trump breaking rules, they don’t like to lose— which could point to Trump’s actual weakness if he gets charged. The biggest polling dip in Trump’s support in years came right after his slate of candidates got walloped in the 2022 midterms.

And that points to a different kind of vulnerability: Trump’s legal troubles can and have actually hurt him and his party with swing voters, costing them general elections. And Republican primary voters do care about electability.

Past events prove that criminal behavior isn’t a dealbreaker for Republican voters. But if Trump’s legal troubles get bad enough in 2024, his primary opponents may have an opening to argue he’s a loser who blew it in 2020, hurt them in 2018 and 2022, and whose baggage could sink them in 2024, too.

That might be an actual drag on his chances at the GOP nomination— and his chances of returning to the White House.

UPDATE

Nancy Cook reported this morning that much of Trump’s “and his team’s time is spent bemoaning his lack of coverage by Fox News and other cable networks, griping about his 2020 reelection defeat— something he’s very much not letting go— and workshopping new nicknames for his chief rival in GOP politics.” Trump is happy with Ron DeSanctimonious “even though others around him don’t think it’s a bullseye. Some of the new ideas the former president’s entertained: ‘Ron DisHonest.’ ‘Ron DeEstablishment.’ Or even, ‘Tiny D.’… Two of Trump’s top campaign aides previously worked for DeSantis.”