Donald Trump really is taking Ron DeSantis down with him

| 9:09 am EDT April 21, 2023
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Criminal defendant Donald Trump, who’s already under indictment for thirty-four felonies and has more serious charges coming in other jurisdictions, is not going to be some viable participant in the 2024 election. He’ll be sitting in prison instead.

But Trump doesn’t want to have to accept that reality. And when he looks at the future that he imagines for himself, the first step to him magically becoming President again is to take out second place Ron DeSantis in the Republican primary race.

Of course up to now, Trump’s mean tweets (on a fake version of Twitter no less) have done nothing to harm DeSantis. The massive plunge that DeSantis has taken over the past month has been all DeSantis. The national media spent two years building him up as “Trump but smarter and savvier and more disciplined.” But when DeSantis finally attempted a national rollout, the public saw that the product did not at all match the description, and so DeSantis’ poll numbers dropped by a stunning half in a mere month.

This would be great news for Trump, at least in the short term, if he were picking up the support that DeSantis has been losing. But the numbers say that he’s not. DeSantis has lost roughly twenty points of support, yet Trump hasn’t gained any of it. Trump is still stuck at the same 55% support in the 2024 Republican primary polling as ever. All the people who left DeSantis have ended up shifting their support to various also-ran candidates, or to the “undecided” column.

The polling makes it pretty clear that among the nearly half the Republican primary voting base that’s already moved on from Trump, none of them are willing to go back to him – especially not now that awaiting criminal trial and the questions about his availability are becoming more pressing. If anything, the massive collapse of DeSantis, and Trump’s inability to gain any voters at all from it, proves just how vulnerable Trump is to being overtaken by the next rising challenger, who’s unlikely to be as self destructive as DeSantis was.

All that said, Trump is managing to do one thing. He’s convinced a number of mid and lower level Republican politicians in Florida to endorse him over DeSantis. Endorsements this early in the primary process don’t count for much, especially when they come from no-name politicians. So this really doesn’t help Trump. No voter is going to say “Wow, I wasn’t going to vote for Trump in the primary, but now that someone I’ve never heard of is endorsing him, I’m in!” But it does hurt DeSantis.

These are Republican politicians in Florida, the state that DeSantis is desperately trying to rule with an iron fist. One of the things that allows a two-bit Governor to get away with abusive overreach is if the Governor’s party is lined up solidly behind him. And yet, even as DeSantis tries to turn around his sinking national fortunes by publicly threatening to build a state prison next to Disney World in a desperate effort to look like a strongman, a growing number of his fellow Florida Republican politicians are endorsing Trump over DeSantis.

Where is this going to leave DeSantis? That’s tough to say precisely. Plenty of “rising” politicians have stepped onto the national stage and quickly gotten laughed off of it, as DeSantis just did. But if they still have state-level support, they usually retreat and try to shore it up. It’s difficult to recall someone instead going into such a funk, he ends up sabotaging his state-level support as well. But DeSantis seems intent on spitefully destroying himself entirely. And now he’s got Donald Trump trying to help him do it.

For a guy with real estate background, Donald Trump never has known how to build anything in politics. His poll numbers and favorability ratings have always been weak. He only ever survived in politics for as long as he did by tearing down his adversaries. He washed out of politics because he couldn’t boost his weak popularity enough to win in 2020. In the two years since, he’s done nothing to help his own position. And now he’s on track for prison. But he sure is managing to undermine DeSantis on his way down.