Crab Mentality

Every Trump-hating conservative has a fantasy about how he might be toppled in a 2024 primary. And it’s almost always the same fantasy.

Not always. Avid fans of The West Wing fan might envision Liz Cheney delivering a soaring repudiation of Trump during a primary debate that finally, finally knocks the scales from the eyes of MAGA Nation, galvanizing the American right behind pro-democracy conservatism.

But most of us lack the imagination to fantasize as outlandishly as that. Our dream of defeating Trump is mundane, more strategic than rhetorical: Clear the field for a single strong challenger. Avoid the errors of 2016. 

“Clear the field” is popular among admirers of Ron DeSantis, and no wonder. DeSantis is the only Republican in the country so far who’s demonstrated strength against Trump. He romped to reelection in November while Trump-backed populists were washing out across the country. Numerous polls taken over the past six months have shown him ahead or competitive with Trump in a head-to-head primary. Typically, no other Republican polls in double digits.

“Clear the field” is a silly fantasy, though.

If Republican politicians were capable of placing the good of the country ahead of their ambition, they wouldn’t be Republican politicians. Look around you. Kevin McCarthy is speaker. Elise Stefanik stands a nonzero chance of becoming America’s next vice president. Eight of the 10 members of the GOP caucus who voted for impeachment in January 2021 are out of work. 

This is a party led by civic perverts. They’re not going to do something as selfless and patriotic as team up, Avengers-style, and unite behind the strongest Trump rival in the name of driving a coup-plotter into retirement. The fact that no one beside DeSantis stands a credible chance of defeating Trump should give other 2024 hopefuls pause, but there’s no reasoning with a governor or senator who looks in the mirror every day and sees a president.

It’s silly. But my own version of the “Trump dethroned” strategy is pretty silly too.

In November I served up a hot take on how a crowded field might—might—work against Trump next time. True, more candidates in the race risks splintering the anti-Trump vote, but maybe not as much as we think. Surely Trump-averse Republican voters have learned their lesson 2016 and will switch to the strongest Trump rival before the primaries begin next time if their favored candidate isn’t gaining traction in polling.

And surely, surely, Republican candidates will understand that they can’t train their fire exclusively on each other next time while ignoring Trump, another strategic error of 2016. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and the rest attacked each other in the belief that whoever emerged as the most popular candidate from the conventional wing of the party would consolidate the Trump-wary majority and cruise to victory.

But by the time Cruz emerged as the One True Alternative to Trump, it was too late. Trump had banked too many delegates and too much momentum for Cruz to mount a comeback.

It’ll be different next time, surely. The crabs have learned that they can’t spend all of their time pulling each other down in the bucket while the orange menace wins primary after primary with 35 percent. Republican candidates will have no choice but to pull Trump down too.

Won’t they?

Maybe not. DeSantis has been attacked by three different Republicans in the last two weeks, one of them familiar and two less so.

The familiar one is Trump, who’s still eagerly taking credit for all of the governor’s political success.

He’s left the “Ron DeSanctimonious” nonsense alone lately, presumably having recognized that if you’re going to preemptively attack a popular rival and alienate parts of your own base in the process, you’d better have a zinger snappier than “Ron DeSanctimonious” in your pocket. But he’s not backing off his overarching criticism that the new guy is mediocre, disloyal, and owes everything he has in politics to him.

“DeSantis versus Trump” is predictable, already barely newsworthy. “DeSantis versus other 2024 Republican hopefuls” is a little zestier.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu has been diplomatic in his criticism of his fellow governor, even mixing in praise. DeSantis is right to worry about wokeness, he’s said—but he’s fighting it the wrong way by targeting private entities like Disney. “I come from the ‘Live Free or Die’ state, and private businesses can and should act like private businesses without the fear of being punished by people that might disagree with them,” he told Fox News. “Those types of culture wars pushing their way into the private sector, that’s definitely not, I think, where we want to be as Americans.”

Sununu also predicted that DeSantis would do well in the New Hampshire primary, but with a notable caveat: “Any governor has to be willing to engage with voters in their homes, in their businesses, in their communities and shake hands. We want to look you in the eye. We want to buy off on you as a person before we even get to policy. If you can’t pass that first test, I don’t care how much money you have, you’re not going to be successful.” Politico published a story on Tuesday wondering whether DeSantis, a politician not known for schmoozing with party bigwigs or with voters, would prove likable enough once he’s finally out on the national trail. Sununu’s remarks seem to betray his own doubts that DeSantis has the retail chops to thrive in a format like that.

Still, those are light jabs. A centrist-y New England Republican who’s disliked by MAGA and stands no chance of winning the nomination won’t draw blood from a populist hero like DeSantis.

A hard shot from a Great Plains Republican who governs a ruby-red state might sting a bit more.

Nate Hochman of National Review reached out to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s office recently for a story he was writing on transgender policy in red states. The response he got from one of her aides was unexpected.

Not only was that unprompted, per Hochman, it’s the sort of lunge-for-the-jugular one might expect in a competitive presidential primary. Abortion might be DeSantis’ only liability as a populist culture warrior; he’s tacked to the right on vaccines and “wokeness” in schools, to take two prominent examples, but he conspicuously declined to tighten Florida’s 15-week abortion ban before his reelection in November. Pro-life activists noticed. He’s now promising to make amends, but conservative rivals in a 2024 primary will eagerly note how he postponed the important work of protecting fetal life for the sake of his own political ambition.

In fact, as Noem demonstrates, they’re already doing it. Which seems strange given that DeSantis hasn’t said he’s running and is unlikely to say so before summer at the earliest.

Normally the crabs don’t start pulling each other back into the pot until they’re actually in the pot. Why have Trump, Sununu, and Noem already begun pulling on DeSantis?

It starts with the polls, of course.

DeSantis has worked hard to maneuver himself into a political sweet spot, mainstream enough for normie suburban Republican voters but with all of the culture-warrior cred that a MAGA voter could want. He may be the only candidate in the field who can drink deeply from each of those wells, which makes him a target for rivals across the right-wing spectrum.

Polls published as recently as a month ago show him leading Trump by double digits in a one-on-one race. That result naturally alarmed Trump, but it must also have alarmed the populist Noem and the establishmentarian Sununu too to see the governor of Florida blocking each of their respective lanes. There’s a chance that DeSantis’ stature will continue to grow during the first half of 2023 and turn the coming primary into a de facto two-man race. Noem and Sununu might be calculating that he’s already the favorite in 2024, in fact, enough of a threat to win the nomination that there’s no time to waste in softening his support.

Which would be ironic in light of the strategic errors of 2016. That year, anti-Trump Republican voters howled at the field to stop attacking each other and instead attack the guy who was leading in the polls. Well, isn’t that what Noem and Sununu are doing right now?

Electoral maneuvering is one reason for the crab mentality among them, but not the only one. All three have sharp differences with DeSantis on policy.

For instance, Chris Sununu’s complaints about Republican governors bullying private entities isn’t new and isn’t limited to Florida. Here he was more than a year ago resisting pleas from a local politician to bar New Hampshire businesses from firing unvaccinated workers. Since when do Republicans tell companies how to run their shops, Sununu asked?

DeSantis signed a bill in November 2021 prohibiting private employer vaccine mandates and battled cruise lines based in Florida for many months over whether they should be entitled to screen passengers by vaccination status. I think Sununu has a good faith philosophical difference with him over when and whether the state should force businesses to conform to conservative cultural preferences and is carrying that forward into 2024.

Trump has a difference with DeSantis over vaccines too, less philosophical than narcissistic. Last year, after DeSantis was asked in an interview whether he’d received a booster and declined to give a straight answer, an annoyed Trump remarked on the gutlessness of certain politicians who refuse to reveal their vaccination status.

When he’s right, he’s right. DeSantis has, in fact, been cynical and gutless in pandering to anti-vaxxers since he realized that being a vaccine skeptic might endear him to populists who otherwise prefer Trump. Trump, on the other hand, has gone from being a vaccine skeptic himself to a vaccine cheerleader, not because he’s been sold on the science but because his Operation Warp Speed program helped bring COVID vaccines to market in record time. He’s still taking credit for that in interviews, as he should. “I was able to get something approved that, you know, that has proven to have saved a lot of lives,” he said recently in an interview with David Brody. “Some people say that I saved 100 million lives worldwide.”

I’m sure he resents DeSantis for downplaying the success of his vaccines, just as I’m sure DeSantis views the issue as a wedge he can drive between Trump and the MAGA base. “Surreal” doesn’t scratch the surface of how it’s going to feel in 2024 when notorious crank Donald Trump is onstage at the debates touting the merits of vaccination while mainstream “sane conservative” Ron DeSantis is babbling about myocarditis and the VAERS system.

In the interview with Brody, Trump knocked DeSantis on COVID policy in another notable way. I never ordered a federal lockdown as president, he pointed out—neglecting to mention that he had no such authority—before adding that Ron DeSantis had, in fact, locked Florida down “for a period of time.” Which is true, although he neglected to mention that DeSantis did so on the recommendation of the Trump administration.

Lockdowns will be a key flashpoint between Trump and DeSantis in 2024, with DeSantis sure to accuse Trump of having let Anthony Fauci lead him around by the nose and Trump countering that DeSantis has no standing to criticize after having briefly shut down Florida. Coincidentally, that’s where Noem comes in: She’s attacked DeSantis over lockdowns before too—from the right.

Team Noem resents that DeSantis has become the national conservative poster boy for keeping businesses open during the pandemic when it was her state, not Florida, that never issued a stay-at-home order. Never mind that, as Hochman notes, it was South Dakota’s state legislature that opposed lockdowns, not Noem herself. It must burn her up to see the governor of Florida surge to top-tier status among Republicans contenders on the strength of his pandemic record when hers is arguably as good, if not better.

There may be another reason beyond policy differences that Noem is keen to attack DeSantis, though. Yes, she wants to hold down his polling in case she runs for president too. Yes, she seemingly has a grudge against him for basking in the anti-lockdown glory she believes is rightly hers. But she might be eyeing a path to higher office in 2024 that doesn’t require somehow defeating both DeSantis and Trump.

Noem may be interested in running for president herself, and therefore would have good reason to go after DeSantis, but she also may be angling for a different role: Trump’s vice president.

…

“I think what Noem gets out of this is currying favor with Trump and raising her stock as a potential VP pick,” a Republican strategist told The Daily Beast, adding that Trump advisers see Noem as “the ideal person for them” to carry out the MAGA black ops mission against Florida’s governor.

…

According to three GOP sources with behind-the-scenes knowledge of the quarrel, Noem has Trump’s blessing to take some shots across the DeSantis bow. And Noem’s efforts haven’t been going unnoticed as Trump continues filling out his VP shortlist.

Chris Sununu has no hope of landing on a ticket with Trump. He’s too centrist, has been too critical of his erstwhile running mate, and wouldn’t help Trump with women voters the way a female vice presidential candidate might. But Noem stands a chance. So does Elise Stefanik. So does Kari Lake. So does Nikki Haley. Every high-profile woman politician in the party, frankly, has an incentive to attack DeSantis on Trump’s behalf.

As does every other Republican who’s betting that Trump, not DeSantis, will prevail in the end.

Jonathan Last published a piece on Tuesday marveling at how DeSantis has begun to use political patronage to woo MAGA influencers like Christopher Rufo into his camp. That’s a savvy move, Last argued, because DeSantis is already indisputably the choice of the Republican establishment in a two-man race with Trump. If he starts locking down populist movers and shakers too, suddenly Trump might find himself with no firm base of support in the party. Not the leadership class, not the donors, not the online right. Not even evangelicals.

It’s an interesting point. But I think it underestimates how quickly things could go sideways for DeSantis if Trump’s polling remains more formidable in the early stages of the primary than we all expect.

Imagine that DeSantis announces in June and the first polls have the race Trump 50, DeSantis 30, Everyone Else 20. Then, after a few months of campaigning and a few debates, the polls look … the same. Which Republicans are going to risk their futures at that point by endorsing DeSantis over Trump?

The salient political fact about Trump is that he craves loyalty and is willing to go to great lengths to punish those who deny it to him. And the salient fact about modern Republican politicians, as noted, is that they’re civic perverts. The more probable a third Trump nomination looks, the more chaotic the stampede to signal loyalty by endorsing him will get. Some of the most obnoxious Republicans in Congress have already endorsed him in order to curry favor, in fact.

It might not just be Noem, Stefanik, and Lake picking fights with Ron DeSantis soon, in other words. It might be all sorts of Republican influencers who believe that the risk of throwing in with Trump is smaller than the risk of throwing in with DeSantis.

Even if DeSantis prevails and wins the nomination, there’s bound to be a sizable contingent of Trump dead-enders within the populist base willing to reward diehards who stuck with Trump to the end politically or financially. Maybe that means a lucrative gig on the vaudeville circuit, maybe it means a leg up in the next Republican Senate or gubernatorial primary in their state. Since Trump himself is destined to carry a vendetta against DeSantis, the GOP, and the “traitors” in the party who endorsed the governor over him, the dead-end Trumpists in the base will have their prejudices against those who backed DeSantis in the primary reinforced again and again over time.

In short, if you’re a crab stuck in a bucket with Ron DeSantis, it’s in your self-interest to try to pull him back down. Maybe it’ll lead to you replacing him as the One True Alternative to Trump in the 2024 race. Maybe it’ll gratify you personally by damaging a politician whose policies you disdain. Maybe it’ll land you a spot as Trump’s running mate, or at least his gratitude en route to a third nomination. And if you want to get really cynical about it, maybe Trump winning the nomination again is better on balance for an ambitious Republican politician than DeSantis winning it. One way or another, having Trump as the nominee in 2024 means a wide open primary in 2028. Not so with DeSantis, who could be seeking reelection as president by then.

The only reason for a Republican hopeful to put their own aspirations aside and back DeSantis in 2024 is because it would be good for the country for the GOP to finally rid itself of Trump. I doubt a single one will pass on the race for that reason.