Behind the scenes, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been behaving exactly like all the other candidates who hope to jump into the 2024 GOP primary. He won’t admit it yet, and neither will the billionaires financing his PAC, but DeSantis is going to jump in. It will probably happen sometime this summer. For anyone who doesn’t think he’s running, you should know that DeSantis’s PAC is already paying the popular Babylon Bee satire website to print negative attack articles against Donald Trump.
The biggest prediction for 2024 on the Republican side is whether Trump and Ron DeSantis are going to have a big fight. They are. Whether it will be a long and bruising fight, like Trump v. Ted Cruz in 2016, or a short affair that fizzles out quickly like Jeb “Please Clap” Bush’s 2016 campaign remains to be seen. We won’t really know until the first GOP primary debate happens.
To be clear: We’re not endorsing either Trump or DeSantis at this point. All politicians should earn our vote, every time. As the two frontrunners, both have strengths and weaknesses.
Some pundits are arguing that it will be terrible for the party if the two have a bruising fight with each other. This is nonsense.
The 2016 GOP primary was brutal. President Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) were cracking jokes about each other’s private parts. But only a fool would argue that the GOP was worse off after that. We got the best possible candidate out of that tough primary, and he pulled off the biggest surprise upset win in American presidential politics. Nobody believed that Trump could pull it off, but he did – because the primary sharpened him into an even better candidate to take on the system.
However, Trump has some serious negatives this time around that we need to be honest about. He’s older. He doesn’t seem to have the same fire in his belly as he did in 2016 and 2020. His campaign seems much slower this time around, so far. Maybe that will change in a few months. We’ll see.
DeSantis is a great governor, definitely one of the best in the country. There’s no question about this. But is he ready for the big stage? We don’t know yet. In all honesty, we’ve seen governors and mayors who seemed like great candidates, but faltered badly once they get up on the first debate stage.
It happened to Rudy Giuliani in 2008. His campaign fizzled out by the time of the first primaries. The same thing happened to Scott Walker in 2016. He was a great GOP governor, but he wasn’t ready to be a president. His campaign got nuked at the very first debate in 2016. Does anyone even remember he was in that race?
Laura Loomer uncovered the fact that DeSantis’s political action committee recently paid the Babylon Bee $21,500. Immediately after that, the Bee published a satire article titled, “Trump Attacks DeSantis For Failing to Fire Dr. Fauci, Rushing Untested Vaccine.”
The Babylon Bee insists that the money was for consulting fees because they’re somehow advising DeSantis’s PAC. If that’s true, why did they suddenly take down the anti-Trump articles once the payment was discovered?
Trump knows DeSantis was behind this, obviously. He immediately attacked DeSantis on Truth Social by posting a picture of DeSantis when he was a teacher, in which DeSantis appears to be plying high school girls with alcohol at a party. It’s official. The gloves are off.
We won’t know whether DeSantis is ready or not, until the first debate. Donald Trump is an old lion. We know he can fight and he can win, because he’s proven it time and time again. DeSantis is a young and hungry lion, but untested. This is the nature of politics, and it’s great for the voters.
Look at how deep our bench is! Democrats are facing existential dread right now because it’s dawned on them that their choice is probably going to be between Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom.
We, on the other hand, have two amazing candidates. May the best man win.
