The campaign for the GOP nomination is underway, and the biggest story is not Donald Trump ramping up his run but Ron DeSantis not running at all. Which is totally running.
I went to the RNC committee meeting, and that turned out awful.
I visited Idaho and was not arrested.
Ron D Is Running By Not Running
Donald Trump rekindled his bumpy campaign with a number of moves that make one scratch his head. His minions went to the Republican National Committee meeting and whipped votes for Ronna McDaniel – I watched it happen – even though he was formally neutral in the race. People took notice. And they also took notice when he went to South Carolina to talk about draining the Swamp with Lindsey Graham by his side.
And he launched more attacks on Ron DeSantis. He insists Ron DeSantis owes him his election and that the Florida governor is disloyal for considering running. I find the idea of demanding loyalty baffling. It looks weak.
Trump’s attacks on DeSantis (supported by his Twitter minions) for being some sort of pandemic fanatic – though the media was calling him “DeathSantis” for not being enough of a fanatic – are kind of bizarre since Trump is all-in on the vaxx. His fans need a vaccine for cognitive dissonance.
And what does DeSantis do? Ignores it and kicks booty in Florida.
His strategy is clearly to let Donald Trump flail at him while he notches achievement after achievement on concealed carry, CRT busting, academia reform and the rest. What this does is encourage Trump’s worst instincts – his inability to be quiet. Now we are seeing his Truth Social posts sounding positively unhinged and coming fast and furious. In one, he labeled DeStantis a “globalist” and also took credit for his career, which is not the own he thinks it is.
It's no longer 2016, and it remains to be seen whether people are still interested in the same kind of smashmouth social media stuff he used to do effectively seven years ago. The problem for him is that this was the stuff many people hated from Trump. He’s reminding people of what they don’t like. And now he has a track record to defend. Some of it is great, but some of it – like his personnel choices – stinks. That’s a problem, too.
Why should DeSantis jump in the ring now? He shouldn’t. He can build his record as Trump punches himself out. Anyone else who gets in is going to get pummeled by Trump, but none have DeSantis’s record, so that’s a fringe benefit of waiting.
And Ron saying nothing is only going to spin Don up. This primary season is going to be lit.
The RNC Chooses Failure
It was an interesting week leading up to the Republican National Committee elections. I went down to Dana Point the Wednesday before to help Harmeet Dhillon. In the end, it was not very helpful. We lost decisively. Interestingly, we had many more committed votes – both to us and to constituents – than appeared in the tallies after the secret ballot. In other words, some number posed in support of reform but voted for the Swamp. Remember, these are people who have usually toiled in their state GOPs for decades, and this gig is a reward for years of service. They are not likely to rock the boat because they are the boat.
It was pretty disappointing. Ronna McDaniel has a legacy of failure, and the base of the party lives in a world where failure has consequences. It does not seem to for our elite. That’s grating.
I know a lot of people are angry. I am angry. But this is one battle in a long war. Will Ronna learn something, will she do something different? I don’t know. She says she will. I do think a lot of folks are going to boycott the RNC, but it’s not clear the RNC actually cares. It seems to be inward-focused and big-donor oriented. The Democrats have mastered harvesting small donor dollars. The GOP leaves that on the table.
Some people are announcing their withdrawal from politics. That never made sense to me. You win today, you lose tomorrow, you win the day after. The only people demoralization helps is the enemy, and I don’t want to help it.
You can have an effect even if most of the 168 committee members ignore you. You can engage locally and shift the state parties to the right. There will be an accounting out in the states. Some of the 168 are getting canned. People are mad, and that translates into change over time. Just not this particular time.
Get up, brush yourself off, and get back into the fight.
Idaho
I visited the Stelter homeland last weekend. It was cold but nice. Too many Californians, though. They have a small wine country, and the wine was often good, putting the lie to the classic Muppet Movie line from Steve Martin. Good food too.
It’s a red state, but apparently, it has the red state problem that causes red state GOP organizations to be soft. There’s no real Democrat competition, so everyone calls himself a Republican. But a portion of them should be Democrats. The lack of competition allows squishes to survive and thrive. You see it a lot. Texas, for instance, is known as deep red, but it’s hardly super-conservative. Florida, which was recently purple, is much harder-core. If you have to fight, you toughen up. Just an observation!
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
