Former President Donald Trump gave his strongest signal yet that he believes he is still running in 2015-16, when he defeated 16 other Republicans on the way to the party’s presidential nomination and, ultimately, the White House.
This could cost Trump dearly in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination — unless his opponents run as if it were an even earlier time.
Trump said in an interview that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), a possible foe for the nomination, is a creature of the Republican establishment he defeated seven years ago.
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The 45th president went so far as to compare DeSantis to another Florida governor who emerged as Trump’s main foil in the 2016 nomination fight: Jeb Bush.
“Karl Rove was one of the people he looks up to. Karl Rove has not been good for the Republican Party. And he’s led a lot of failed campaigns,” Trump told Just the News, referring to DeSantis. “Paul Ryan is another one that he likes a lot. Paul Ryan, that’s another beauty — and Jeb, of course.”
The Trump campaign similarly tied former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other GOP establishment figures after she became the first major rival to launch a campaign.
But based on the polling, DeSantis is the main threat to Trump winning the Republican nomination for the third consecutive election. The former president has responded accordingly.
“If you look at the videos, my numbers have shot up in the last few weeks,” Trump said. “And Ron DeSanctimonious and his numbers have really crashed because, you know, they’re saying he was against Social Security, he was against Medicare … little things like that.”
Recent polls have shown Trump rebounding after losing momentum to DeSantis.
Trump is harkening back to the populist campaign that won him the Republican nomination against more than a dozen experienced politicians, running to the right on issues like immigration while dissenting from the kind of entitlement reforms championed by Ryan.
If the rest of the GOP field runs on a return to the years of former President George W. Bush, this strategy could work.
Haley is seen by many Republicans as a throwback to Bush on foreign policy. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton, two fellow Trump appointees with similar views, are also said to be eyeing the race.
Immigration is another flashpoint in the Republican contest that could see grassroots conservatives siding with Trump over Bush and the business wing of the party.
DeSantis is not a declared candidate for the Republican nomination. He is not expected to make a final decision about running for president until after the Florida legislative session expires later this year.
But DeSantis has not sent out Bush-like signals in the run-up to a possible White House bid. He most recently said there should be no “blank check” for Ukraine, echoing a phrase used by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) before last year’s midterm elections, and that China was the main threat to the United States.
DeSantis has also clashed with President Joe Biden on immigration, sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in protest of the burgeoning border crisis.
Nearly all the announced or prospective Republican candidates have so far taken a stronger tone on cultural issues than did Bush, who was a social conservative but not a combative one. Bush also tended to use lingo familiar to evangelicals that might be missed by swing voters when addressing these hot-button topics.
Haley, in showcasing her gender and background, took pains to disassociate her diversity from identity politics and use her success as a woman of color as a refutation of woke ideology on the Left.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR), Trump’s former White House press secretary, previewed Haley’s pitch for a new generation of leadership in her Republican rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address. But she invited comparisons to two previous speeches by Republican presidential candidates: the 1992 “culture war” speech by Pat Buchanan and Trump’s 2017 “American carnage” address.
Buchanan challenged the Bushes near the height of the political dynasty, and Trump defeated them afterward.
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Trump is betting that other Republicans will repeat the mistakes that facilitated his takeover of the GOP in his first campaign.
If Trump’s rivals have learned these lessons, however, his road gets more difficult.
