Well, it appears that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has survived the tantrum from the right-wing Freedom Caucus members after he made a deal with Joe Biden that essentially won none of their priorities and pushed off their next hostage opportunity until 2025. They weren't happy but they were anxious to get back to screeching about "wokeness," attacking the "Deep State" and pretending to do investigations into Joe Biden so they let it slide.
With that saga ending with a whimper, not a bang, it's time to rejoin the Republican presidential primary clown car. Both front-runner former President Donald Trump and his chief rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were in Iowa this week wooing the midwestern white conservatives who are the supposed avatars of Real America. Appearing before small intimate crowds isn't either man's strong suit but it's an important rite of passage that even Donald Trump can't entirely escape.
Trump seems annoyed having to do a meet and greet with a handful of commoners at his event in Iowa yesterday: “I can blame you for holding up Simon then, right?” pic.twitter.com/CJvPVMyS4i
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 1, 2023
He takes a lot of pictures with fans at Mar-a-Lago but they've paid an admission fee. Trump famously made his feelings known back in 2016 when he told a reporter:
Don't forget that when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can't do that in New Hampshire, you can't do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see — cause I did big rallies, 3-4-5K people would come . . . and they said, "Wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that's not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go to people's living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time." I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living room they'd lose total respect for me. They'd say, I've got Trump in my living room, this is weird.
Speaking of weird, Ron DeSantis has been trying his best to act like a human but it's obviously very difficult for him:
Desantis getting a little testy responding to Trump’s remarks earlier. Watch his face - he hates being around people. pic.twitter.com/QtdBoInU7i
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 1, 2023
People are wondering why he pronounces his last name in two different ways (sometimes it's Dee-Santis and sometimes it's Duh-Santis) and that makes him testy as well:
Desantis is asked about changing the pronunciation of his last name: “This is ridiculous.. The way to pronounce my last name? ‘Winner.’” pic.twitter.com/RrMAav9fq3
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 2, 2023
That's very cute but it doesn't address the question as to why he would do something so odd. The man's reputation for being just plain weird grows stronger by the day.
There was some substance, if you want to call it that, at the various events the two men attended. DeSantis touted his record in Florida while Trump touted his alleged 40 point lead in the state and told those gathered at the Westside Conservative Club of Urbandale, "I got China to give them for their farmers $28 billion, and a lot of people in this room, you got checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars." (That is a lie, of course. US consumers paid for the tariffs on Chinese goods and US taxpayers bailed out the farmers for the Chinese retaliation.)
Later he had a bigger town hall crowd with Fox News celebrity Sean Hannity in which he claimed he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours by making them sit down together and refuted DeSantis' contention that it will take eight years to destroy woke leftism by promising to turn the country around in six months. (Presumably, it will be right after he enacts his health care plan that he promised was coming in two weeks back in 2020.)
The crowd was very excited:
During commercial break at the @seanhannity townhall, the crowd erupted in a “We Love Trump” chant. pic.twitter.com/HejT8nuwV0
— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) June 2, 2023
DeSantis has begun to attack Trump to reporters while continuing to only refer to him obliquely in his speeches. He complains that he didn't fire Dr. Anthony Fauci during the pandemic as part of his dishonest account of his superior COVID performance (Trump didn't have the power to fire him) and hits him for not closing the border. Trump, on the other hand, attacks and insults in the usual way but he is saying a few things that deviate from the standard right-wing line, just as he did in 2016.
For instance:
I don't think Donald Trump is the most electable Republican, because he's a pathologically unstable maniac, but he understands what makes a candidate electable better than any other Republican and it's a big advantage https://t.co/s8kLHRjmZR
— Michael Caley (@MC_of_A) June 1, 2023
He used the term himself just a few hours later discussing the military, but it's clear he went after DeSantis for his "woke" crusade because polling shows that most people think of "woke" as a positive term. He took credit for the COVID vaccine when one of the people in the crowd complained about the "jab" saying "there's a big portion of the country that thinks they are a great thing." He's also hedging on abortion in ways that are very dicey, especially with the Iowa GOP which is heavily Evangelical. But he's looking ahead to the general election knowing that abortion bans like the one DeSantis signed in Florida are deadly for the Republican Party.
You'll recall that Trump did this in 2016, staking out a few positions to the left of the conservative base, most significantly his promise to protect Social Security and Medicare from cuts which had been bedrock right-wing principles for decades. It's part of what made him different and appealing. Axios reported that Trump's pollster Tony Fabrizio has been making the case that DeSantis is unelectable because of his hard right policies and Trump is clearly listening to him. Fabrizio says that they've done surveys that show that when people in swing states hear what he's been up to, his support craters.
It's not just the 6-week abortion ban and the fight with Disney, which are "electorally fatal." It's also DeSantis' past support for cutting the social safety net and enacting a national sales tax, as well as the book banning. Whether Trump can thread the needle on all of that is up in the air. He's been on all sides of the Disney thing and his rhetoric on abortion is satisfying no one. But it's clear that he's going to go after DeSantis' record on these issues one way or the other. His Super Pac is already running ads on his votes to cut Social Security.
For his part, DeSantis seems to think he has the slam dunk electability argument with his exhortations to put an end to the "culture of losing," suggesting in so many words that Trump is a loser who has run the GOP into the ground. He's right about that but he doesn't seem to realize that Republican voters are convinced otherwise. On Tuesday, Monmouth released a poll showing that almost two-thirds of Republicans think Trump is best positioned to beat Biden.
And why wouldn't they? They believe that Trump won the last election in a landslide and the Democrats stole it from him! Until Ron DeSantis and the rest of the field are willing to admit that Trump's contention that he actually won the election was a big lie, this attack is going to not only fall flat, it's going to offend the very voters to whom they are trying to appeal.
This rivalry is probably not going to last very long. DeSantis may pull out a win in Iowa but the political graveyard is full of candidates who won the state and were never heard from again so that's not going to tell the tale. The fact is that there are just too many Republicans who are still in love with Donald Trump and unless something catastrophic happens it's going to be almost impossible to beat him in the GOP primary. Certainly, an uncharismatic grouch who pronounces his own name differently every other day is highly unlikely to do it.
