Former President Donald Trump’s decision Tuesday night to announce a reelection bid a week after the midterm elections escalated what had been a simmering feud within the ranks of the GOP into a full-scale civil war.
At the center sits Ron DeSantis, Florida’s newly-reelected governor who rocketed to national prominence as the darling apprentice of the former president.
He is now being promoted by a growing group of establishment factions within the Republican Party as the replacement candidate for Trump. They are moved less by the fact that Trump attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired the deadly riot at the Capitol in a failed attempt to remain in power, but more by the fact that the candidates he recruited and endorsed were rejected by voters.
