Double down on being bad.
Advice for Ron DeSantis. Say:
"Trump broke laws? I don't care. I'll pardon him anyway. Let the Democrats seethe."
He needs to read the room of the GOP primary voters. They don't care if Trump is a crook.
Ron DeSantis has the immediate task of winning the GOP nomination. Yesterday's post on Jason Aldean's music video notes the mood of energized and engaged GOP voters. They have doubled down on belligerence. Trump doesn't offer policy so much as tribal validation. Their tribe is under attack, as they see it, and they want a ruthless fighter, unbound by Mr. Nice Guy rules. Meanwhile DeSantis is trying to finesse the Trump crime problem by changing the subject. That is probably good enough to keep from angering the 50+% of die-hard Trump supporters in the party, but it isn't good enough to win the nomination. Let's look again at the question that is central to how GOP rivals handle Trump's lawbreaking. Jake Tapper asked it:
If Jack Smith has evidence of criminality, should Donald Trump be held accountable?
The honorable, law-abiding, patriotic answer would be to say: This is a country of laws and we swore an oath to uphold the law. Of course Trump should be held to account.
Republican voters don't want to hear that. Trump offered them a taste of swashbuckling rule-breaking and they like it. GOP elected officials go along. They don't want process or rule of law. They want a result: Winning, in a battle against the evil Democrat-allied enemies of legitimate Americans like themselves. Democrats are so evil, so dangerous, that rules don't apply. Anything goes. Anything. DeSantis' answer was a mere pivot. Like Trump, he attacked the justice system. That makes him me-too, second best, and weak.
DeSantis' best choice would be to double down. Again, read the room and address the reality that GOP voters know full well Trump broke laws. Trump is bad. Be more bad. The news of Trump’s crimes has drifted into the information silo. In the back of their minds, GOP voters know he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. They heard the Access Hollywood tape. They know it is the kind of thing Trump did or does. They don't care. GOP voters know full well Trump cheats on his taxes, stiffs vendors, and calls it smart. They don't care. GOP voters know full well he took documents from the White House, hid them at his homes, and lied to the FBI about it. They hear him brag that he did so. They don't care. They know full well he bullied election officials, got people to sign fake elector ballots, that he tried to get state legislatures to declare him the victor, and that he roused up a crowd to frighten Pence and Congress into overthrowing the 2020 election. They don't care. In fact, they are happy he did it. Victory would have been his if Pence had come through.
DeSantis has one big advantage over Trump. DeSantis isn't under indictment. He doesn't have Trump's political complications. A majority of Americans already know they dislike Trump, and strategic GOP voters realize that Democrats want the beatable Trump be the face of the GOP. Trump acts punch drunk. He is no longer the best messenger of Trump-ism. A majority of Americans don't know enough about DeSantis to dislike him. My advice to DeSantis is to go all in. Be as cynical as the GOP voters. Say loudly and clearly that Trump broke laws. Say you don't care, and that you will pardon Trump in your first hour in office. Say what you do care about is stuffing it to those liberal, woke, nitpicking, communist prosecutors and fake-news-viewing Democrats who hate Trump. Say that Trump is just trying to bring sanity back to America and his heart was in the right place.
This is cynical. Saying you don't care if Trump is a crook is bad for America. But Trump sold the idea that rules and laws are meant to be broken, and a huge number of GOP voters bought it. That is your market -- the lawless authoritarian populist voter. Republican voters don't want rectitude. Liz Cheney's defeat taught us that. So do Pence’s poll numbers. To win the nomination, DeSantis needs to out-Trump Trump.
In the general election campaign, say pardoning Trump is an effort to heal the nation. A lot of moderate voters want that. Then stop talking policy and talk only about how young you are and how old Biden is. It might work. It might not. But it has a better chance of working than what he is doing now.