DeSantis vs. Trump as the tortoise and the hare
W. James Antle III
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The 2024 Republican presidential primaries are already shaping up to be a race between the tortoise and the hare.
Former President Donald Trump barely waited for the midterm elections to come to a close before announcing his third consecutive presidential campaign, a speedy launch that extended his time running for the White House to nearly a decade. His primary foe is the slow and steady shadow campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who has yet to declare and may not do so until the end of his state’s legislative session.
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The 44-year-old DeSantis would probably prefer that the 76-year-old Trump be seen as the tortoise. But DeSantis has been methodical, measured, and deliberative in his approach to a potential 2024 campaign. Trump plows straight ahead, bursting through basic political norms in the process.
To shift to a different animal metaphor, Trump remains a bull in a china shop. That may be true to an extent of DeSantis in Tallahassee, but it is not his place in the Republican presidential conversation.
When DeSantis received negative feedback on his answers to Tucker Carlson about the war in Ukraine, he clarified and recalibrated. There were normal news stories about the challenges of a governor growing into foreign policy leadership.
Trump, who has vowed he has a secret plan to end the war in 24 hours, was busy using a rumored indictment, expected largely because he had teased that he was about to be arrested, to his political advantage.
The two men have similarities. But they are not the same.
Trump has launched sharp personal attacks against DeSantis before the Florida governor even announces while mostly ignoring the already declared candidates. His overarching theme is that DeSantis is a phony, a creature of an anti-Trump Republican establishment seeking to co-opt the MAGA movement.
But Trump is at least as animated by the fact that he endorsed DeSantis in 2018, when the younger man was no shoo-in for governor, but is not receiving any deference about a 2024 bid from his understudy. In the process, Trump has thrown the kitchen sink at everything from DeSantis’s gubernatorial record to his meatball consumption habits to vague sexually charged quasi-innuendo.
“Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!),” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!”
DeSantis, by contrast, has been slow to counterpunch against Trump. He at first clearly wanted to stay above the fray and be seen as only fighting Democrats. He then began to draw subtle but unmistakable comparisons with Trump’s struggles with White House leaks and personnel choices, all areas where even the ex-president’s strongest defenders might like to see improvement.
More recently, DeSantis has begun to hit Trump a bit more where it hurts. First, he repeated the Stormy Daniels allegations as a way of reminding Republican primary voters, especially evangelicals, that only one of them stands accused of paying hush money to a porn star to conceal an extramarital affair. Second, DeSantis noted that he was a “winner,” implying that Trump, who attaches a great deal of significance to that label, was not.
DeSantis could still be weeks away from getting into the race. Trump has been running for president almost nonstop since 2015 and has toyed with campaigns as far back as 1999.
There is an element of risk to both strategies.
The risk for Trump is that he will wear his material and himself out before voters are paying serious attention, making DeSantis’s point to Republicans that the former president isn’t focused on the right things for him. If the GOP wants a leader who is less fixated on personal grievances and petty insults, the choice will be clear. DeSantis’s calm demeanor will become an asset.
The risk for DeSantis is that he winds up being defined by Trump before entering the Republican primaries. That might not mean Trump’s wildest swings land, but if DeSantis looks too calculating for the GOP base, it could prove damaging if not fatal.
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In Aesop’s fable, the arrogant hare taunts the tortoise for getting nowhere. The hare then loses in an embarrassing fashion.
It remains to be seen whether slow and steady also wins the presidential race.