You Say You Want a Revolution

If your highest priority as a Republican is choosing a nominee who will “shake things up” as president, how are you voting in the coming primary?

Answering that question was easy in 2016. On the one hand there was Trump, on the other a menu of traditional politicians who hadn’t accomplished anything as legislators (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio) or weren’t populist enough as governors to suit the right-wing base (Jeb Bush, John Kasich).

For an electorate craving maximum disruption, there was only one choice. And insofar as there was another, it’s no coincidence that the second-place finisher’s claim to fame was shutting down the government.

Republican voters crave disruption. But who is the candidate of disruption in 2024?

A friend made an interesting point recently after watching Ron DeSantis antagonize both wings of the party by describing the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” lacking any vital U.S. interest. Defense hawks resented him for taking a cynical anti-anti-Russian line to woo populists; Trumpists resented him for mimicking their hero on policy to disguise his hawkish past. DeSantis responded to the outcry by pivoting, criticizing Russia and Putin harshly in an interview with Piers Morgan to reassure hawks that he shares their moral instincts about the war even if he doesn’t share their preference for funding it unto eternity.

His hawkish fans were appeased afterward, sort of, but couldn’t help wincing at the clumsiness of his posturing.

My friend’s insight was that the Ukraine episode showed how Trump and DeSantis, each lionized by their admirers as men of conviction, are opposites in a sense. Trump has extreme instincts but was deterred repeatedly from following them by his advisers while in office. DeSantis, by contrast, works his will routinely in governing Florida but retreated toward a mainstream position on Ukraine when his initial reaction proved too extreme for some of his fans.

Who is the candidate of disruption between the two? The radical who doesn’t know how to govern effectively or the effective governor whose radicalism is shallow?

It feels strange to say that the architect of the insurrection, who tried to stage a “soft” coup to keep himself in power, had difficulty as president realizing his most radical impulses. But he did.

Trump is a man who wanted to remove Robert Mueller as special counsel in the Russiagate probe before his lawyer dissuaded him. Who moved to appoint coup-enabler Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general before his lawyers talked him out of that, too. Who once ordered the rapid withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, then canceled the order when his aides incredulously asked whether he really meant it. Who complained about U.S. membership in NATO and U.S. troops being stationed in South Korea yet stuck with the status quo on both. Who spent the early months of the pandemic following Anthony Fauci’s lead on lockdowns, even criticizing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp publicly for reopening his state early. Who toyed with pardoning the January 6 rioters before doing nothing.

The most meaningful domestic legislative achievement of his administration wasn’t building the border wall, of which less than 500 miles were constructed. It was enacting a tax cut written by establishment titans Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the benefits of which accrued mostly to America’s upper class instead of to Trump’s working-class base.

Given his track record of yielding to the enemies of populism, electing him to a second term and handing him huge Republican majorities in Congress might end with him signing comprehensive immigration reform into law.

On the other hand.

He fired the director of the FBI when that director wouldn’t vouch for his innocence during the still-live Russiagate investigation. He alienated some of his most important Cabinet officials, then replaced them after they quit with underqualified yes-men who dodged Senate confirmation. He’s already scheming to purge the federal civil service of career employees and to replace them with underqualified political loyalists if he returns to office. He has, allegedly, voiced his desire to pull the United States out of NATO if given a second term.

And of course, he was willing to go very far indeed in pressuring lower-ranking Republicans, from Mike Pence to Brad Raffensperger to federal and state legislators, to try to overturn a national election.

Trump is generally quite malleable with respect to policy because, presumably, he lacks firm ideological convictions on most subjects. Try to imagine President DeSantis making encouraging noises about amnesty for illegal immigrants or gun control, by comparison. But with respect to those few policies on which he does have strong convictions—protectionism, skepticism of alliances, infatuation with foreign strongmen, resentment of institutional checks on his own power—he’d behave more radically in a second term, I suspect, than President DeSantis would.

Wouldn’t he?

There’s already a genre of “DeSantis would be worse than Trump” punditry on the left and not just for the usual reason that liberals need to demonize any Republican up-and-comer who threatens them electorally. The governor has two traits that make Democrats worry. One is that he’s moved, and continues to move, remarkably quickly in enacting his agenda in Florida and makes no apologies for it. The other is that he’s willing to behave less responsibly than Trump in some respects for the sake of pandering to right-wing populists.

Left to his own devices, I don’t imagine President DeSantis would withdraw from NATO. But if the war between Russia and Ukraine dragged on for two more years, if the cost to American taxpayers of supplying the Ukrainians continued to rise, and if Republican opinion turned decidedly against U.S. involvement in European wars, I wouldn’t bet everything I own that DeSantis would stick with the status quo on NATO. Even if the war doesn’t drag on, he might take such a beating from Trump loyalists in this year’s primary for being a “globalist” that he’ll be keen to make a grand gesture as president to prove them wrong.

And if he did move to leave NATO, he wouldn’t be talked out of it as easily as Trump would. DeSantis understands law and policy; his advisers won’t be able to gaslight him about what is and isn’t procedurally possible or diplomatically dangerous.

I’ve written many times in my newsletter that the GOP’s problem fundamentally isn’t a “Trump problem,” it’s a “Trump voter problem.” Populism, more so than its champion, is propelling the party toward bad, occasionally pernicious political choices. If you agree, you can see the case that DeSantis, not Trump, will be the most disruptive “man of conviction” on the ballot next year. An effective governor who lunges at every populist fad that comes down the pike (CRT! Anti-vaxism! Dumping illegal immigrants in blue states!) might do more damage as president than a self-obsessed authoritarian like Trump depending upon how obnoxious those fads become.

Put it this way. If laws banning flag burning became the latest populist cause celebre, President Trump would spend weeks sporadically tweeting his support for them amid many more deranged posts about the rigged election of 2020 and the latest “animal” district attorney who’s investigating him. But ultimately he would leave it to Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell to take the initiative and would probably forget the whole business in short order if McCarthy and McConnell ignored him.

President DeSantis would dial up McCarthy and McConnell and tell them to have a bill on his desk in a week.

Who’s the bigger disrupter?

Trump is the bigger disrupter, of course. That’s why I’m reluctantly supporting DeSantis in the primary.

I would put it this way: President DeSantis would disrupt “the system” by working within the system. (Mostly?) President Trump would look to smash “the system” entirely, much more so than even in 2016. There’s a reason why the most Jacobin right-wing populist influencers have begun rallying behind Trump while DeSantis goes about trying to build a coalition of populists and traditional conservatives. The latter aim to influence American society by advancing right-wing policies; the Trump gang wants to influence it by bending the institutions of American government to Trump’s will.

For example, I don’t expect we’ll see DeSantis paying lavish tribute to the January 6 rioters at his rallies this year. That’s the sort of thing a candidate does to signal that he intends to operate entirely outside “the system,” identifying himself frankly with outlaws.

We won’t see DeSantis post any images of himself seemingly teeing up to hit a prosecutor in the head with a baseball bat or threatening “death and destruction” if he faces some personal setback either.

Trump’s MAGA base is properly understood at this point as a revolutionary movement. They might sing from the same hymnal as DeSantis’ fans about “wokeness,” trans rights, and so on, but it’s not policy that unites and motivates them. Nor does Trump pretend that it does. The emotional heart of his pitch to fans at his rally in Waco this weekend had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with settling scores against his institutional enemies.

Trump [claimed] that his personal life “has been turned upside down” because of “prosecutorial misconduct by radical left maniacs” and framed the various investigations as political attacks coordinated by Democrats in Washington.

He said: “You will be vindicated and proud. The thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”

He declared that his “enemies are desperate to stop us”, and “our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”

That’s revolutionary rhetoric. The story Trump is telling is a revolution in three steps: In 2016 the people overcame “the system,” in 2020 “the system” reclaimed power from the people through chicanery, and in 2024 the final battle with “the system” will be fought. How “the system” is defined is deliberately cagey to facilitate Trump’s populist demagoguery—sometimes it’s the so-called “deep state,” increasingly it’s classical liberalism writ large—but the fact remains that policy has nothing to do with any of this.

You can see it too in how Trump and his fans have attacked DeSantis. There’s been some policy chatter about his track record on entitlement reform as a congressman but most of the criticism has to do with questioning the governor’s revolutionary authenticity. He’s a Paul Ryan acolyte; he’s supported by Jeb Bush; he’s a “globalist.” He’s counterrevolutionary. (“Controlled opposition,” in the words of Steve Bannon.) He’s ancien regime. Whatever policies he’s been moving in Florida are so irrelevant to these people as to amount to meaninglessness, which is how we ended up recently with Trump praising “Ocean and Sunshine” for Florida’s successes rather than DeSantis.

Insofar as anyone still wonders how getting indicted could help a political candidate electorally, that explains it. To a revolutionary movement, being charged criminally isn’t a reflection on your character. It’s a badge of honor, proof that you’re a threat to “the system” so formidable that locking you up is the only way it can stop you from toppling it.

All of that being so, one wonders how effective DeSantis’ strategy will be in framing Trump as the “chaos” candidate. The governor’s pitch to Republicans in 2024 can be summarized as “No drama, just results.” In a normal political party, that would be appealing; it’s an electability argument by another name. But in a party dominated by revolutionaries, campaigning against chaos is fraught.

After all, how disruptive can a revolutionary leader be if he fears “chaos”?

There’s another reason beside their differences on revolution that I worry more about Trump than DeSantis. I’m not sure that the blundering fascist would be quite so blundering next time.

David Frum likes to say of a second Trump term that “the velociraptors have learned to work the doorknobs.” When Trump took office in 2017, he knew nothing about the presidency or government. Warnings from his aides that he couldn’t pursue a particular course of action for reasons of law or propriety carried weight. But gradually the velociraptor learned to work the doorknobs. By late 2020, he had grown comfortable enough asserting the power of his office that he used it to try to finagle an honest-to-goodness autogolpe. 

There will be no James Mattises or Pat Cipollones in the next Cabinet to provide Trump with sober advice against his own instincts. Being term-limited, he won’t worry how swing voters might react to him indulging his most radical impulses. Having won reelection on a message of nothing more or less than taking revenge on his institutional enemies, he’ll believe he has a mandate to test the checks on his presidential power. A man already inclined to believe that he can reshape reality itself through sustained gaslighting will set about reshaping the reality of government however he can.

It’s hard to out-disrupt that.

You’re free to believe that a man of right-wing conviction like DeSantis who’s been chasing a revolutionary fad will be more dangerous as president than a man of actual revolutionary conviction, but I find that hard to believe given the difference in their respective paths to victory. 

The more illiberal Trump gets in his public pronouncements, the more heavily he’ll be forced to rely on historic turnout among right-wing populists to carry him to a win. To hold his own with swing voters he’ll need either an economic downturn or a Joe Biden health crisis or both. Because DeSantis is courting populists and traditional conservatives, and because his record on COVID and “woke” issues in education will attract suburbanites, his coalition will be more diverse. His fad-chasing in Florida lately might be circumstantial, driven by the belief that the only way to stay viable in a Republican primary against Trump is to keep pace with him on populist issues. Once he’s safely elected president, those electoral incentives will change: If he panders to Trumpists too much, his national coalition might fracture.

He can retain the loyalty of the Republican base as president, I suspect, by governing more or less according to his actual preferences while picking a few opportune fights with Democrats.
So, if you’re voting in a Republican primary next year (and everyone should!), choose the style of disruption you prefer. If you want a populist revolution in federal policy, you’re more likely to get that from DeSantis—at least on matters where the public broadly agrees with the populist position, which it does not when it comes to Ukraine. If you want a populist revolution in federal government, tearing out institutions by the roots and giving a deranged illiberal strongman a free hand to work his will, that’s Trump. Use “the system” to advance your goals or burn it down to punish “the elites”: Those are the right’s choices. I have a hunch as to which they’ll choose.