“I have what it takes to be president and I can beat Biden.”
With that bold declaration in an interview with journalist Piers Morgan on Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis all but announced his candidacy for the highest office in the land in 2024. And while that comes as a surprise to almost nobody, his gloves-off remarks about the giant of a man he will have to overcome to win the Republican nomination signals the unofficial start of what promises to be a scorched-earth GOP primary.
Indeed, with his mentor-turned-rival Donald Trump unleashing both political and personal attacks on him on an almost daily basis – from describing him as just another average governor and tool of the establishment to implying that DeSantis was “grooming” teenage girls – the race could well be decided by DeSantis’s willingness to engage in hand to hand combat – for better or worse. And after largely holding his fire in the midst of Trump’s repeated attacks in recent weeks, the Florida governor finally unleashed a barrage of direct or implied criticism of the man who never fails to argue that he is single-handedly responsible for DeSantis’s meteoric rise from backbench congressman to arguably the most famous governor in the country.
Can Ron DeSantis play on Trump’s field?
Of course, as the likes of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio can attest, going mano a mano against the 45th president is fraught with peril. “Lyin’ Ted” and “Little Marco” tried to do the impossible in 2016, out-Trumping Trump by engaging in playground-level name-calling, and wound up embarrassing themselves. But in his interview with Morgan, DeSantis appeared comfortable in his skin, with both his policy- and personality-based criticisms of Trump, and in describing the differences between him and the Donald.
DeSantis emphasized first that the most obvious parting of ways revolves around their responses to the pandemic: “The approach to Covid was different. I would have fired someone like Fauci … I think he did a lot of damage.” He goes on to cite his “approach to leadership,” a transparent implication that it is superior to that of Trump. “The way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board … It’s not important for me to be fighting with people on social media. It’s not accomplishing anything for the people I represent.”
Ron DeSantis (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
But DeSantis’s third point of comparison likely stings the most among Trump-only supporters. Citing not just his landslide re-election but also the battles he has waged and won in his war on wokeness in Florida – from defrocking Disney to shutting down the queering of the state education system – he declared that he is all about being a “winner.” The obvious implication is that, for all his talk about winning, Trump has not done much of it in the last three election cycles.
Meanwhile, DeSantis cleverly managed to capitalize on the pending indictment of his rival. He attacked the flimsy basis for the arrest, but played dumb while simultaneously demeaning Trump’s character: “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.”
Belying the image of him as a humorless, impersonal pol with social interaction deficits, as portrayed by Trump and the left, DeSantis also showed a playful side in responding to Trump’s nickname for him, DeSanctimonious: “I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels.”
Trump, of course, responded to the interview immediately on Truth Social, implying that DeSantis is an untested neophyte: “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!). I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!”
But the problem Trump will have in trying to diminish DeSantis is explaining away his ringing endorsement of the then-candidate for governor in 2018 (bound to be used in coming campaign commercials): “Ron DeSantis is a brilliant young leader. Yale and then Harvard who would make a great Governor of Florida. He loves our country. He’s a true fighter.” Not much ambiguity or wiggle room in that statement.
No one asks people to hold their breath waiting for something they know is not going to happen. Thus, when asked directly if he will, in fact, run for president, DeSantis’s response was every bit as transparent as his own head-to-head comparison and seemingly inevitable showdown with Trump: “stay tuned.”
