Bowing to popular demand to expand upon my recent analysis of the DeSantis strategy, I note that all the smart insiders, like @MAGAKing69 and @TrumpMemeLord4976, have come to a conclusion – it's time for Governor Ron DeSantis to pull out of the race. It's all over, seven months before the actual voting, because the polls they like reinforce their (and the Bulwark sissies', and the Democrats') hope that Heavy D just can't touch the Trump. Maybe. It's possible that Donald Trump has this race won right now, and the governor is just too dense to see that there's no way things can possibly change in a race against a volatile guy with multiple indictments (frame jobs, BTW) here and coming over the next half a year. But Ron DeSantis is a Roman – Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, to be precise – and he's fighting his fight, not the fight the braying bots demand he fight.
That's where his Fabian Strategy comes in – and full credit to my pal, the great Michael Walsh, for identifying Proconsul Ronulus as harkening back to the old SPQR paradigm. Who was Fabius? He was the guy who refused to lose. That's how the Romans won – they just refused to get a clue and quit. Of course, DeSantis is not in the straits Rome found herself in after they got impatient and stopped listening to Fabius. He's locked in second place behind Trump but ahead of the clown car of wannabes, neverwillbes, and fat people who divide up what's left. He's poised to strike, and his plan requires not that he win right now but simply that he does not lose.
Now, let me take a page from history, which predates 1619, and set the stage. Hannibal hated the Romans from the First Punic War, and in the Second, he crossed the Alps to get at them on their home turf. The Romans thought they would thrash this African barbarian – they were aggressive dudes. They marched north and got promptly crushed at Trebia, then at Lake Trasimene, and then just brutally at Cannae. The common thread was that Rome saw its enemy and went right at him for a decisive fight. This was exactly what Hannibal wanted. He wanted fights on his terms, got them, and after three butt-kickings (read more in Walsh's great book 'Last Stands"), the cream of the Roman elite was in heaps, their legions were annihilated, and the road to Rome lay open.
All seemed lost. Then the Romans turned to Fabius, who refused to fight on Hannibal's terms. As the fecund Romans generated new armies, Fabius denied Hannibal the battle he wanted. He shadowed the Carthaginians, picked at them, but refused to close with them. This drove the bloodthirsty Romans nuts, and when they failed to keep to the Fabian strategy they got crushed again.
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Ron DeSantis refuses to close with Trump for now, and that's smart. Sure, he picks at him, just enough to keep him in a tizzy of angry Truths and to enrage the bot armies, but this is not the time for a direct fight with the Orange Man. DeSantis sees that the people who like Trump – and most DeSantis supporters like Trump too – cannot be brow-beaten into supporting a different candidate. They must come to their conclusion on their own – they must decide that while Trump is the victim of the most outrageous government/media conspiracy in American history, he is also the GOP candidate most likely to lose in the general simply because about 53% of Americans irrationally and unreasonably hate him – and worse, those are concentrated in must-win states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. The GOP voters, sick of an establishment telling them what to do, are not about to let anyone tell them anything. So, DeSantis is counting on them coming to the right conclusion on their own. They need time to do that. Time is DeSantis's friend and Trump's enemy. Trump needs to wrap this up before his justifiably furious supporters start running general election scenarios through their heads and figuring out that nominating Trump is re-electing Grandpa Badfinger.
Hence the Fabian strategy.
Stay alive, build up your forces, and wait for the right time to fight. DeSantis need not be the guy who takes on Trump head-to-head. Chris Christie has decided to do that, so let the former Jersey governor waddle into the Octagon and do battle. DeSantis will be building an army of doorknockers in Iowa while Trump – who is allegedly spending money he should be spending on infrastructure on his legal bills – fulminates at his nemesis du jour.
Trump's strategy is an inevitability. He is seeking to demonstrate that his victory in the primary – we never hear about his plan to achieve one of those victories in the general election where he actually takes office instead of "wins" and then channels Stacey Abrams from the golf course – is a done deal. So, you hear about how DeSantis is finished, how his campaign is the worst there ever was, about how he's a coward, and, of course, MEATBALL!
But Fabian did not waver. They called him a coward, inept, and probably Meatballus. But he held firm to his strategy, and Rome got stronger as Hannibal got weaker. That's the plan. Trump has peaked at about 50% of the GOP vote in some polls. He can only go down since half the party has moved on. People want to win, and the longer they have to be reminded about the tiresome aspects of the Trump Show, the more likely they are to look for an alternative. And there is none but Ron DeSantis. Nikki Haley and Tim Scott were plausible back in 2005. No one wants pious Mike Pence. Chris Christie's sell-by date was 2012. And the rest of them are simply punchlines. Do you know anyone saying, "Gosh, Will Hurd is my guy?" They will all run out of money along the way. This is a two-man race.
And it's a marathon, not a sprint. Ron DeSantis, like Fabius, must merely hold on. He just has to not quit. That's why they are trying their ham-handed attempts to psyche him out and get him off his plan. They know that if RDS does not get crushed now, he is in the fight, and the decisive battles will be in Iowa and New Hampshire. Team DeSantis is preparing the groundwork for those fights while Trump is trying to relive the glory days of 2016 with lots of social media, interviews, and the occasional rally to audiences of superfans who follow his shows like patriotic Grateful Deadheads with MAGA hats instead of tie-dye.
Will the DeSantis Fabian strategy work? Fabius's plan did. Rome survived, grew more powerful, and eventually beat the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War. In the Third Punic War, the Romans finished the job, sowing the ruins of Carthage with salt. Hopefully, if DeSantis's strategy pays off and he wins (unlike Trump, DeSantis is beating Biden in the battleground states), he can pull a Carthage on the whole damn swamp.
Because that's how Romans roll.
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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."
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