Trump's Next Power Play

Will the 45th president begin acting like the 2024 nomination is his by right?

Former President Donald Trump speaks on September 17, 2022 in Youngstown, Ohio at a Save America Rally to support Republican candidates running for state and federal offices. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

We hear a lot these days about how the GOP is Donald Trump’s party. But is it really?

The Coming Trump-DeSantis Smackdown?

Writing at The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio suggests that the time is fast approaching when the former president will begin lashing out at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been hogging the headlines with stunts intended to bolster his position as he prepares to run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. DeSantis is also attempting to strengthen his position in his ongoing race for re-election against Democrat Charlie Crist. If he ends up beating Trump’s 3.5 percentage-point margin over Joe Biden in Florida two years ago, DeSantis will have a claim to be the strongest option to defeat Biden (or Vice President Kamala Harris) two years from now. Trump needs to strike now, Catoggio argues, to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Catoggio’s analysis is insightful, as is his speculation about precisely how Trump might go after his rival for the nomination. (Read the piece here.) But I think Trump has a smarter play available than the one Catoggio proposes for him—one that could render a frontal attack on DeSantis superfluous. That doesn’t mean Trump will do it. It certainly doesn’t mean I want him to do it. (I’m on the record thinking it would be marginally less terrible for the country for DeSantis to end up as the GOP nominee in 2024.) But it’s what Trump would do in order to establish once and for all that the Republican Party is his—and that any and all challenges to his ownership of the party, including by the Florida governor, are foolhardy and bound to end in political ruin.

The Bolder and Smarter Move

Trump is in a good position to make a bolder move based on his standing in early GOP primary polls: He’s beating the Florida governor by nearly 30 points. Thirty points is a lot, especially when DeSantis is clocking in at around 23 percent. That means Trump is more than lapping him. (No one else among the likely candidates so far cracks 10 percent support.) Now it’s true that there haven’t been any polls since DeSantis made national headlines last week by treating asylum seekers from Venezuela as human props in a bid to beat Trump at his own nativist game. But Trump has a long way to fall and DeSantis has a long way to climb. So the nomination is still very much Trump’s to lose.

Given that position of strength, why would Trump preemptively attack DeSantis, thereby elevating him to the status of a worthy rival? Such an attack could also backfire on Trump in unpredictable ways. (Catoggio does a nice job of thinking some of them through.)

Instead, the smarter move is for Trump to declare his candidacy for the presidency soon—and definitely before the midterm elections. He’s threatened for months to do it this fall, and it’s easy to see why. To announce before the midterm elections would be unprecedentedly early—and would only underline that Trump is a unique candidate untethered from the norms that apply to other politicians. He would in effect be anointing himself the nominee and daring any would-be challenger to try and knock him off the pedestal.

That includes the Florida governor, who certainly couldn’t announce his own campaign (and begin lobbing barbs at the former president) until after his re-election in November, and probably not for some time following it. (Proclaiming his intent to flee Tallahassee for the campaign trail soon after winning the governor’s race could sharply antagonize Florida voters, undermining one of his perceived strengths as a presidential candidate.) Once Trump has declared, additional publicity-seeking stunts like the one DeSantis pulled last week in Martha’s Vineyard would look like passive-aggressive acting out against the presumptive nominee. Trump’s quips in response almost write themselves: What are you doing there, Little Ronnie? Having fun playing president? Why don’t you do your job and leave that to me.

In launching his presidential campaign well over a year before the first primaries, Trump would effectively eliminate any need to directly attack DeSantis or any other Republican. It would be up to them to defy Trump, the only man in the race, and one very far in the polling lead. In those circumstances, I suspect DeSantis as well as everyone else would hesitate to lash out, or even to run at all. (I’m talking about the Trump wannabes here. A spoiler, like Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, may well try to challenge the presumptive nominee as long as the funding is there for it.)

Rule By Right

The reason this move could be effective is that it would be an assertion by the 45th president that the 2024 Republican nomination is his by right.

The closest we’ve come to anything like that in the recent past was the presumption very early on in the 2016 Democratic presidential contest that Hillary Clinton was foreordained to be her party’s nominee that year. But of course, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ remarkably potent challenge to that presumption immediately demonstrated its folly. Even a former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State had to fight for her party’s nod against an upstart democratic-socialist challenger, showing that no one could claim the Democratic Party nomination by right. That’s the way parties in a robustly democratic political culture are supposed to function.   

But it doesn’t work like that in many right-wing populist parties around the world, which tend to be thoroughly identified with and dominated by particular personalities one can hardly imagine being dislodged. Forza Italia in Italy has been called the “personal party” of Silvio Berlusconi. Marine Le Pen exercises direct control over France’s National Rally, as her father did before her (under its former name, the National Front). The Fidesz Party in Hungary has become synonymous with the person and right-wing populist policies of Viktor Orbán. Benjamin Netanyahu stands astride the Likud Party in Israel.  

All of these figures rule their parties without serious challenge. No one within the parties seriously questions their dominance. That’s because in each case, the principal is tacitly understood to be the party’s rightful leader. Deference to their authority and status is pervasive—and absolutely required in order to secure advancement, funding support, and other perks of power. Defiance is rare and swiftly (and severely) punished.

Some of this is already in place within the GOP, as we’ve seen repeatedly since Trump left office. Those who refuse to defer to Trump—like Cheney and Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer—have found themselves deprived of party support and quickly booted from office, while those who make a strong public showing of fealty to the former president end up drawn closer to the center of power.

Trump’s Personal Plaything

Yet several individuals have very clearly signaled their intent to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In addition to DeSantis, there’s former Vice President Mike Pence, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and numerous senators and other officials who served in the Trump administration. As far as I know, only Haley has explicitly foresworn running if Trump announces—placing herself at the head of the line to bow down in supplication before the king the moment he declares his intent.

But what about the others? Would any of them directly challenge the self-anointed 2024 nominee and risk their political futures in the GOP? Would they deny, before the Republican voters, the country, and the world that Trump is the rightful leader of the party?

The answer to those questions will usefully clarify the precise extent to which the Republican Party has become the personal plaything of Donald Trump.