Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are about to destroy each other
Donald Trump, who just finished spending the midterms proving how toxically unpopular he is with general election voters, is (allegedly) about to announce a 2024 presidential campaign just before he’s criminally indicted for espionage. Trump, obviously, has no chance of success with this endeavor. He couldn’t compete even if he weren’t going to prison. But because Trump’s life as he knows it is over, and he’s desperate to prove to himself that he’s somehow magically too powerful to be indicted, he’s probably about to go through the motions of trying to get an essentially imaginary 2024 campaign off the ground anyway – if only because he’s about to have nothing left to lose.
This comes even as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has managed to turn Florida into such a post apocalyptic hellhole over the past four years, enough right wing trash flocked to the state to hand him an easy reelection victory yesterday. DeSantis certainly intends to try to parlay this into success in the 2024 presidential race. But while he may be able to compete in the Republican 2024 primary race if the party is still leaning to the extreme right by then, DeSantis is almost tailor-made to get blown out in the presidential general election. After all, extremists like him have zero appeal to the moderate voters who decide the presidential swing states.
So the Republicans now have two 2024 “frontrunners” who are both the kind of candidates who are built to win the nomination and then lose the general election badly. It’s the last thing the Republican Party wants to face. And yet it’s somehow worse for the GOP, because – and this can’t be stressed often enough – Trump is about to be indicted for espionage. In spite of all the pundit doomsday hysteria out there, being indicted for espionage does not somehow make it easier to be a candidate. Imagine Trump trying to get permission to travel for his campaign while he’s under house arrest while awaiting trial. It’s that impractical.
Yet because Trump is going to lose literally everything anyway, and he couldn’t care less about the damage he does to the Republican Party, Trump will have no hesitation to try to preemptively destroy Ron DeSantis in the coming months. Not only does Trump famously have no loyalty to his own allies, he particularly resents that his protege DeSantis is daring to run against him. As Trump’s life is completely destroyed in the coming months, he’s inclined to take out his frustrations on DeSantis in particular. After all, Trump will surely end up trying to convince himself that DeSantis is the only thing stopping Trump from carrying out his magic carpet rescue fantasy, and that if he can destroy DeSantis, it’ll mean Trump has somehow magically saved himself from destruction.
Trump is even hinting that he has dirt that can destroy DeSantis. Given what an arrogantly overconfident idiot DeSantis is, we wouldn’t be surprised by that at all. So now we’re left to wonder if DeSantis will even run in 2024, given that Trump could potentially blackmail him out of it. In such case we’d be talking about DeSantis reluctantly sitting out a presidential election just so Trump can launch an imaginary “campaign” that collapses amid indictment before we even get to 2024.
It’s difficult to predict precisely how the Trump vs. DeSantis war will play out, because Trump is mentally unstable and desperate and about to have his life ripped to pieces by indictment, and because DeSantis is an idiot, and because Trump may or may not have the blackmail material against DeSantis that he claims he does. These two monsters deserve each other. It’s getting increasingly difficult to see either one of them making it as a 2024 candidate. Trump’s life is over, and he seems singularly obsessed with taking DeSantis down with him.
