by Domenico Maceri * –
SAN LUIS OBISPO (USA). “I don’t know what happened to Donald Trump: he is a different man today than he ran in 2015 and 2016 and I think his campaign is going in the wrong direction”. So Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, in a radio interview with host Matt Murphy, a few days after the announcement of his official candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential elections.
DeSantis’ candidacy had already been in the air for several months especially after his landslide victory for governor of Sunshine State in 2022. DeSantis defeated his Democratic opponent Charlie Crist by a margin of 19 points, a notable improvement from his 2018 victory when won by a margin of 0.4 percent. The second win was also interpreted as one of the few highlights for the Republican Party in 2022 that fell short of projected electoral expectations. The 2022 midterm election was expected to be a red wave with victories in both the House and Senate. The narrow victory in the Lower House and the failure to win a majority in the Senate have been interpreted as another defeat for the former president. After his presidential victory in 2016, Trump failed to achieve positive electoral results for his party keeping in mind the defeat in the House in 2018, followed by the presidential defeat and that in the Senate in 2020 and 2022. As you remember, Trump has never accepted Joe Biden’s victory, falsely attributing it to the rigged election.
Considering all these defeats, a change of candidate for the 2024 presidential elections was inevitable, but the former president did not stand aside and ran again. The rise of DeSantis had led to speculate that he was challenging Trump for the nomination of the Republican Party and the governor of Florida did not disappoint. His announcement via the Twitter platform was delayed by about thirty minutes by a series of embarrassing technical problems. Nonetheless DeSantis explained it that there were too many individuals connected and that blew up the broadcast. In any case, the governor of Florida saw light in his announcement considering the six million dollars in contributions received shortly thereafter.
Trump is a political anomaly because despite his defeat in the 2020 presidential elections, he has not stood aside as the vast majority of losing candidates of the two parties have historically done. He has kept afloat and to a large extent continues to be the “owner” of the Republican Party. DeSantis seemed to have all the credentials to force him to step aside and in some polls gave him a hard time. However, the latest polls have seen the former president on the rise and therefore DeSantis’ task is becoming difficult.
The governor of Florida has already given very clear signals, veiled but recently clear, that the Republican Party must change course or remain on the sidelines. We need a generational change and he, at the age of 44, would represent the future. His work in Florida would prove him right because he has managed, thanks to the super Republican majority in both state houses, to shift the political center of gravity towards the extreme right. DeSantis passed far-right laws that Trump never dreamed of passing. Abortion has been reduced to the first six weeks of pregnancy, public education has been moved to conservative extremes, more than 500 books have been banned for content he deems inappropriate, and civil rights have been curtailed. In fact, DeSantis argues, quite rightly, that if Trump hasn’t kept his promises like building the wall on the Mexican border, he can demonstrate concrete conservative results. In fact, DeSantis has moved so far to the right that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the historic minority rights organization, has warned African-Americans that Florida’s political climate has made the state potentially dangerous and those wishing to visit should take appropriate prudent measures.
Defeating Trump in the primaries will not be easy for DeSantis even if he has managed to obtain considerable economic resources through the Super Pac “Never Back Down” (Never Surrender) which would be ready to spend more than 200 million dollars on his campaign. In the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election, Trump gave his endorsement to DeSantis. The former president therefore interpreted DeSantis’ challenge to the presidency as a betrayal. Right at the time of writing we are informed that two more “traitors” will announce their challenge to Trump. His former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The first would give Trump little trouble according to the polls. But the latter could pose a more serious challenge. If DeSantis has been careful with his covert attacks on the 45th president, Christie has come completely out. It should be remembered that Christie ran for president in 2016 but after a short time he abandoned the race, becoming one of Trump’s biggest supporters. Now, however, the former governor of New Jersey has outspokenly declared that Trump “was a failure in politics but also in human behavior”. Trump’s nomination as presidential candidate “would guarantee the election of Joe Biden,” according to Christie. However, the former president also continues to have serious legal problems. Just these days we are informed by Cnn that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who is investigating Trump on top secret documents and the events of January 6, 2021, is in possession of a recording in which Trump discusses a secret document on the possible invasion of Iran at his New Jersey resort. In the recording dated July 2021, Trump also discusses the fact that perhaps he should not have mentioned it, acknowledging that the possession of the document and its contents dealt with legal information of national security. The former president’s judicial troubles could include the crime of sedition which would disqualify Trump from any public office.
* Domenico Maceri, PhD, is professor emeritus at Allan Hancock College, Santa Maria, California. Some of his articles have won awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications.