In practical terms, Barron Trump’s truncated stint on the political stage as a Florida delegate to the Republican party’s national convention was little more than symbolic. His father Donald Trump’s third successive presidential campaign as the Republican nominee was all but certain anyway, and the names of those who will confirm it are essentially inconsequential.
It did affirm to many analysts, however, how the former president has maneuvered to seize almost total control of the party’s state apparatus nationwide. Nowhere is that more apparent than Florida, where the capitulation was completed by the choice of delegates for July’s convention in Milwaukee.
Even though 18-year-old Barron Trump has now stepped down, ostensibly after his mother, former first lady Melania Trump, discovered a pressing prior engagement, there will be plenty of other family members as representatives. Barron’s step-siblings Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany are named, along with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr’s fiancee.
Tiffany’s husband, Michael Boulos, and an assorted slew of other notable Trump acolytes and loyalists, are also on the list.
The parallels in Trump’s subjugation of the national Republican party, and the installation of Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, as its co-chair, are hard to miss – especially as it was Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, who was once seen as a potential “Trump killer” in the party’s nomination race until, of course, Trump quickly vanquished him.
“The big, sort of under-the-radar story in American politics over the last couple of years was the way Trump and his people had taken over state parties across the country,” said Dan Judy, a senior analyst for North Star Opinion Research, a Republican guidance and consultancy company based in Virginia.
“Even early in the primary process, a year and a half ago when Ron DeSantis was riding high and leading a lot of the polls, I was always thinking: Trump has control of the state parties, he’s got his people in, and they are, for lack of a better word, going to attempt to rig the process in favor of Donald Trump.
“If you look at it, that’s exactly what happened. A lot of state parties changed their rules to make their primaries winner-takes-all, which absolutely helped Trump, especially as it came down to a one-on-one with Nikki Haley. It was clear that she was going to have to win some of these things outright to get any delegates at all, and she couldn’t do it.
“The fact that the Florida GOP has also been completely taken over by Trump folks is really indicative of a trend that has happened everywhere.”
Judy pointed to how easily Trump took down DeSantis in the primary race, humiliating the governor he disparaged as “Meatball Ron” in his own state. DeSantis’s efforts to cajole Florida’s congressional delegation were ultimately futile, and he dropped out in January to avoid a spanking in the state’s March primary.
“As high as he was riding after his huge re-election victory, just any hope that he would have had of continuing to be top dog in the Florida GOP went out the window when he failed to get any traction at all in the presidential race,” said Judy, who has worked for the winning campaigns of several Republican politicians, including DeSantis and the Florida senator Marco Rubio.
“He’s not the kind of person who cultivates relationships, who builds relationships, who builds a party, an organization, and an apparatus. He’s just not that guy, and if you’re going around Florida looking for Ron DeSantis people, there are shockingly few of them.
“But if Donald Trump is re-elected, there might be a place in the administration for him. If he wants to have a future in the current Republican party, he cannot be an enemy of Donald Trump, and you’re seeing him do the things that he needs to do to remain in good standing.”
Those actions include a full-throated endorsement of the man who repeatedly demeaned and insulted him, and cozying up to him at a breakfast meeting near Miami last month, in which Trump claimed DeSantis pledged total fealty.
In a similar vein, a succession of other senior state Republicans have fallen in line. Junior senator Rick Scott, a former Florida governor who faces a potentially tricky re-election battle in November, appeared last week alongside Trump to support him at his hush-money trial in Manhattan.
And an elected member of the Florida cabinet, the chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, seemingly cannot do enough to champion the twice-impeached former president currently facing dozens of criminal charges in cases around the country.
Patronis, who was thwarted by DeSantis in January when he floated a bill to hand $5m of Florida taxpayers’ money to Trump for his legal bills, returned last week with an alternative proposal: he wrote to Trump announcing he was due $54,000 in “unclaimed property” that Patronis hoped he would use to fight “some very, very nasty people coming after you”.
To observers of Florida politics, all of this, and particularly the surfeit of Trumps among the slate of delegates, is telling.
“It does illustrate in pretty stark terms how effectively the former president has his hand on the state Republican party, and his influence on what goes on,” said Kevin Wagner, associate dean of Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F Schmidt college of arts and letters.
“It’s not unexpected that the likely presidential nominee has significant influence in his home state, but even by that standard there’s a level of control over the party that’s pretty distinctive.
“As a practical matter, the party is going to be united behind a former president, at least through an election year. And I think you’ll see that in the way that political leaders on the Republican side are behaving in Florida.”
Wagner said voters were unlikely to care about Trump’s children carrying the state party’s flag in Milwaukee, with or without Barron Trump.
“Among the Republican base that is very supportive of the former president, I don’t think any of this matters. In fact, they probably would approve,” he said.
“Some Republicans might be bothered, but there’s no evidence in Florida right now that this is a particularly close race so it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot. The caveat is we are in May and the election’s in November.
“But right now, I’d say that Donald Trump has a very strong position in the state of Florida, and that’s reflected by how political leaders in the state are responding to him, and also by the amount of deference that the party gives.”
