Until further notice, Trump is what the GOP base wants.
Unrequited hope has Ron DeSantis’s exit from the Republican primary feeling like a basal disappointment rather than just the conclusion of another mismanaged and forgettable primary campaign run by a rising GOP governor.
Most of all, the DeSantis-inspired discontent exists because — for those of us who desired to find a principled conservative to whom one could attach Trumpish anti-Left muscularity without the personal and policy failures of Trump — one must now accept there can be nothing within a light-year of Trump that isn’t the Don himself.
Like an expanding black hole, Trump has consumed into his campaign each defeated rival, no matter the foe’s ostensible positions, including Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, and Tim Scott (with the exception of Asa Hutchinson, who’s backing Nikki Haley). Fifty percent of the Republican electorate loves the guy, as evinced by a further rise in the polls while the formerly bucky primary field falls in line behind him. He was inevitable. We just didn’t know it.
For the early part of 2023, those who spend their lives in the political soup had the liberty of the public’s temporary noninterest to imagine what each of the candidates could do. Trump was on the outside looking in, and it seemed like whatever charisma he had in 2016 was gone. His weakness was tantalizing for those who were ready for a serious Republican Party. But it was hibernation rather than expiration that consumed his days, and the provocation of indictments roused him and the basilisk of grievance that is his companion.
Back in the realm of punditry and primary-forecasting (a locale similar to a Magic: The Gathering meet), we compared the stats of each primary candidate and how they might match up in ideal circumstances — the combos! the matchups! — but then watched as candidates managed to damage themselves and one another while Trump sat back and cheered on the disarray and fratricide.
We arrived in January and discovered that the winner of gladiatorial combat was not the last man (or woman) standing but rather the gladiator who said he had jury duty and skipped the fight to sit in court. The remaining combatants were too busy keeping knives away from their backs to successfully notify the public of this oversight.
DeSantis shouldn’t have run without knocking Trump out first, and Trump is what the GOP base wants until further notice. Commentators’ and donors’ wish-casting of a new direction for the party changes the scenery during the electoral calendar’s off-season, but that scenery immediately resets when the public’s attention returns to politics.
Here a relevant stanza from Wordsworth’s “Rob Roy’s Grave“:
“For why?—because the good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
That they should take, who have the power,
And they should keep who can.
DeSantis might return to his turf war against woke corporations, Haley will eventually succumb to increasing unpopularity, and Trump will spend the general-election season moldering on a Florida beach while Biden does the same on a Delaware equivalent. At least the consultants got rich.