DeSantis, Casey

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares119 Views

    Trump Has Made Claims About Caucus Fraud. What if He Underperforms?

    by

    The last time Donald J. Trump participated in competitive Iowa caucuses, he lost narrowly, accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of stealing the contest, claimed fraud, demanded that Iowa Republicans nullify the results, and called for a rerun.While Iowa has a history of troubles with its caucus results, there’s been no evidence of fraud. The 2016 Republican contest was, in fact, the only one since 2008 that had gone off without a hitch.And yet if Monday night ends with Mr. Trump underperforming expectations, both his history and his rhetoric during this year’s campaign suggest he won’t hesitate to cry foul and refuse to accept the result.Mr. Trump has already accused Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida of “trying to rig” the caucuses. Laura Loomer, a far-right and anti-Muslim activist whom Mr. Trump last year considered hiring for a campaign post, suggested on social media that “the deep state” was engaging in “weather manipulation” to instigate Iowa’s Friday snowstorm and subzero temperatures to depress Trump turnout on Monday. And Donald Trump Jr. suggested in a Telegram video that “we can’t take anything for granted, or assume that everything is going to be on the up and up. We’ve seen this rodeo before.”Those claims are not likely to be met with much support from Iowa Republicans and the party volunteers who will operate the 1,657 caucus sites across the state.“If Trump says it’s fraud, he’s full of crap,” said A.J. Spiker, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa who is backing Mr. DeSantis.Still, Iowa Republicans aim to protect themselves from campaigns claiming foul play at the caucuses.At each site, caucusgoers mark their presidential preferences on paper slips. Those slips are then counted in full view of whoever wants to watch. Typically a representative from each campaign watches the counting, and recording is allowed.“It’s the most transparent straw vote you could possibly do,” Mr. Spiker said.The Trump campaign’s headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa, on Saturday.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s pre-emptive Iowa fraud claims last month followed a flub by Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis. She called on supporters to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” she said.That earned Ms. DeSantis a rebuke from the state Republican Party.Only Iowans can participate in the caucuses. Republican volunteers are supposed to check for photo identification at the caucus sites. Still, Mr. Trump’s campaign suggested then that the DeSantis campaign had professed a “plot to rig the caucus through fraud.”Another candidate who has trafficked in conspiracies and has been sowing doubt about Iowa’s caucuses is Vivek Ramaswamy, who failed to qualify for recent debates.“The mainstream media is trying to rig the Iowa G.O.P. caucus in favor of the corporate candidates who they can control,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in a campaign video this week. “Don’t fall for their trick. They don’t want you to hear from me about the truth.”Voting rights groups and disinformation experts say the pre-emptive cries about fraud and rigged elections have become something of a new normal.“This follows the general playbook, the election denier playbook of just pre-emptively laying the groundwork for claims of fraud in the event of a loss,” said Emma Steiner, the Information Accountability Project Manager at Common Cause, a left-leaning voting rights organization. “It’s sort of future-proofing.”Indeed, Mr. Trump has long trumpeted baseless claims of fraud or rigging before an election. In 2016, weeks before Election Day, Mr. Trump started questioning the veracity of mail ballots in Colorado, citing little evidence. After he won the 2016 election, Mr. Trump claimed that widespread fraud cost him the popular vote (it did not), and he launched a commission to investigate voter fraud in the country (it folded without any significant findings).The Trump team has called elections rigged even when he is not participating in them. When the 2020 Democratic caucuses melted down because of a faulty app and a disorganized state party, Mr. Trump’s campaign questioned whether the results were “being rigged against Bernie Sanders.” His sons went further.“Mark my words, they are rigging this thing,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter the night of the 2020 caucuses. “What a mess.” More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Republican Presidential Primary: 7 Numbers That Tell the Story

      by

      There’s $46,499,124.63. There’s 3 percent. Here are five other figures that shed light on the dynamics at play before Monday’s caucuses.The only numbers that will truly matter in the Iowa caucuses on Monday will be the number of votes tallied for Donald J. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.But there are a number of, well, numbers that help explain the Republican nominating contest. In most polls, Mr. Trump holds a solid lead, while Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are battling it out far behind in a fight for second place.Here are seven numbers that show how we got here — and what comes next.28 percentage pointsMr. Trump’s lead in the Iowa Poll The bar has been set.In the Iowa Poll released on Saturday evening by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, Mr. Trump was winning 48 percent of likely caucusgoers. It’s a dominant showing that’s more than the total support measured for Ms. Haley (20 percent) and Mr. DeSantis (16 percent) combined.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Did Ron DeSantis Shake His Wife’s Hand?

      by

      In a campaign full of strained social interactions and clumsy pantomimes of warmth, Ron DeSantis’s encounter with his wife at the presidential primary debate in Des Moines on Wednesday night was one of the more curious.During the second commercial break, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, strode to the edge of the stage and reached down to shake hands with Gov. Kim Reynolds, Republican of Iowa, and her husband. Then, with a businesslike rigor, he grasped the outstretched palm of Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady.Did he just shake his wife’s hand? Onlookers in the room were bewildered.Interactions with spouses on the campaign trail can be fraught, even for the most adept politicians and for the warmest of marriages. To be fair, Mr. DeSantis was standing on an elevated stage, on a tight timetable, making an embrace impractical. Too much affection runs its own political risks.And who knows? Maybe The Handshake was some sort of inside joke, or an effort to create a signature routine, like Barack and Michelle Obama’s coy fist bump (which was weaponized by Mr. Obama’s political foes as a “terrorist fist jab”).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign

      by

      The video, called “Let’s Get Ready to Bumble,” is a slick mash-up of President Biden’s verbal slip-ups and his stumbles set to a thumping 1990s dance track. And when it was played on a big screen at Trump rallies late last year, it consistently drew laughs and jeers from the crowd.But Donald J. Trump thought he could improve it.So the former president asked an adviser to pass along a few notes to one of the video’s creators: It should include a clip of the president falling off a bicycle, he suggested, and another of him flubbing a line in a recent speech.The video’s co-creator — Bryan Heestand, a product engineer in Ohio who goes by the anonymous handle C3PMeme — rushed to incorporate the former president’s edits. He was delighted, he said later in a podcast interview, to see Mr. Trump play the new version at his final rally before the midterm elections, pausing his speech to watch it with well over a thousand supporters gathered at Dayton International Airport.“He had some suggestions. We made it happen,” Mr. Heestand said.Mr. Heestand doesn’t work for Mr. Trump, but he belongs to a small circle of video meme-makers who have effectively served as a shadow online ad agency for his presidential campaign. Led by a little-known podcaster and life coach, this meme team has spent much of the year flooding social media with content that lionizes the former president, promotes his White House bid and brutally denigrates his opponents.Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously, adopting the cartoonish aesthetic and unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls.Cheered on by Mr. Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor.Their most vulgar invectives are often aimed at women, particularly those seen as enemies of Mr. Trump. In one video, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s face is pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman, who kicks a man with the face of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the groin. Another depicts Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, as a porn star. Women with ties to Mr. DeSantis are often shown with red knees, suggesting they have performed a sex act.The former president and his inner circle have celebrated the group’s work and helped it reach millions. Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s social media adviser; Steven Cheung, the campaign’s spokesman; and Donald Trump Jr. frequently share the memes on their social media accounts.Since March, Mr. Trump has posted videos made by the team to his Truth Social and Instagram accounts — which have more than 30 million followers combined — at least two dozen times. He tends to share the group’s less crude content, favoring memes that feature him in a positive light.But Mr. Trump and his campaign have also taken a more active role in the group’s activities, a New York Times review found. Over the past year, he and his campaign have privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content. In at least one instance, the campaign shared behind-the-scenes footage to be used in videos, according to members of the team.Late last month, Mr. Trump sent personalized notes to several of the group’s members, thanking them for their work. In September, Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, posted that the meme team was “single-handedly changing the landscape of politics and social media.”Asked by The Times about the group, the Trump campaign on Tuesday cast them as mere volunteers.“Every campaign in politics has volunteers and shows appreciation to their volunteers,” said Mr. Cheung, the campaign spokesman, adding that the group had done a “masterful job” highlighting Mr. DeSantis’s “insecurities and blunders.”Viral memes have played a role in presidential races since Barack Obama’s first run for the White House in 2008. But the meme team’s work — blessed by Mr. Trump, polished and substantially scaled up — represents an evolution with the potential to transform campaigning online.In an age of social media, the power of memes is rising as the influence of traditional television ads fades. Cheap to make and free to distribute, they are largely unconstrained by regulations about accuracy, fairness and transparency that apply to television and radio advertising. And they are proliferating just as fewer internet platforms try to police political content.“It’s ominous,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission lawyer who now works at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog nonprofit.Mr. Ghosh said the meme team’s activities appeared to fit the definition of a super PAC — an entity that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support a candidate or issue but must report its donors and spending. Yet because the group operates outside the campaign finance system, its finances and funders remain unknown.The lack of transparency “creates an avenue for lots of money to be spent in coordination with a campaign and having a serious impact on races without the public having any sense of what’s really going on,” Mr. Ghosh said.‘It Doesn’t Have to Be True’At the center of Mr. Trump’s meme militia is Brenden Dilley, a 41-year-old podcaster, failed congressional candidate and self-described social media and political influencer. Mr. Dilley doesn’t create the memes himself, but he provides the organizing force and smash-mouth ethos driving the crew.“It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to go viral,” he has said on his podcast.Brenden Dilley, a life coach and onetime congressional candidate, is the ringleader of the meme team. His podcast offers a running narrative of the team’s work and ambitions.The group’s more than two dozen members, posting under the hashtag #DilleyMemeTeam, convene in a private Telegram channel to share ideas and pick targets. Many also faithfully tune into Mr. Dilley’s daily podcast, where he talks at length about the group’s activities, interacts with a small but devoted audience and promotes his 2013 self-help book, “Still Breathin’: The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man.”Most of the meme-makers post anonymously. The Times used podcast transcripts, photographs, news footage and public records to identify Mr. Heestand, who declined to comment.While some members have sizable followings, they have also been amplified by high-profile right-wing figures. Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Mr. Trump, hosted Mr. Dilley on his podcast last week, saying that he had “changed the course of history in this country.” The right-wing podcaster Jack Posobiec and the internet troll known as Catturd, who each have more than two million followers on X, regularly share the group’s work.But the team’s content isn’t just niche entertainment for the profoundly online; many memes have broken through to the mainstream.A video calling President Biden a “puppet candidate” and filled with conspiracy theories about election fraud went viral in July after Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, posted his criticism, calling it “the most alarming political ad I’ve seen this year.”In an interview, Mr. Luntz said he worried that such spots would soon become commonplace. “They have figured out how to manipulate the public,” Mr. Luntz said, “and they frankly don’t care about the consequences.”In August, when Mr. Trump was indicted on conspiracy charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, several team members produced a music video targeting the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. A Kanye West parody, it used artificial intelligence to mimic Mr. Trump’s voice rapping lyrics that were peppered with racist dog whistles.The initial posting on social media, by the meme team member Ramble_Rants, logged 1.4 million views on X and was widely shared on other platforms.Nobody has borne the brunt of the group’s attacks more than Mr. DeSantis.Ron and Casey DeSantis have been mocked relentlessly by the Dilley Meme Team, which takes credit for some of its insults having broken into the mainstream media. Meg Kinnard/Associated PressThe meme team has produced hundreds of derisive posts attacking the Florida governor’s masculinity, demeanor, marriage and parenting, and his height.The group’s members have described the onslaught as part guerrilla messaging aimed at shaping coverage of the race and part psy-op aimed at the candidate himself. They take credit for catapulting “bootgate” — the unproven rumor that Mr. DeSantis wears lifts in his cowboy boots — into the mainstream media. (Politico published a 1,400-word investigation into the candidate’s footwear in October.) They also claim its barrage of mockery is the reason Mr. DeSantis wears the boots in the first place.“They all went straight to his head,” Ramble_Rants posted last month.The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Dilley has sworn to “destroy” the governor’s career and make him “unelectable,” even if he drops out of the 2024 race. A recent Christmas-themed meme directed at Mr. DeSantis ended with: “Forever you will be mocked.”The Dilley Meme Team’s work is often cartoonish and rife with mockery, savaging Mr. Trump’s opponents while lionizing the former president. A video that focused on President Biden was played at Trump rallies last year. A recent meme delivered a message to Mr. DeSantis. Another appeared to use behind-the-scenes images of Mr. Trump. Mr. Dilley declined to be interviewed for this article, and the team subsequently produced a video mocking The New York Times. Mr. Dilley told his podcast listeners that he planned to hang a copy of this article next to a signed letter from Mr. Trump.“Thanks to your efforts,” that letter reads, according to photos posted to social media, “we exposed Joe Biden’s failures and lies for the whole country to see.”Gratitude and AccessMr. Dilley has been a supporter of Mr. Trump for years, and in 2018 he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Arizona as a “staunch believer in the Make America Great Again movement.” But until recently, his devotion always came from a distance.Today, Mr. Dilley, who now lives north of Atlanta, says he has visited Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort three times in the past year. He and his team have posted numerous photos of themselves posing with Mr. Trump, spending time with his advisers and attending events at Trump properties.During an episode of his show just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Dilley claimed to be texting one of those advisers, asking if he could join the former president at a football game at the University of South Carolina. That weekend, he and his wife were photographed by Mr. Miller in the governor’s box at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, S.C., along with Mr. Trump.A video that Mr. Dilley’s wife, Reanna, shot of Mr. Trump walking on the field at halftime was subsequently viewed millions of times online and reposted by the former president on Truth Social.Like many other influencers, Mr. Dilley appears to receive talking points from the campaign. He also claims more exclusive access, describing phone calls from advisers to Mr. Trump to discuss memes his team is producing and whether they strike the desired tone.In July, one of the group’s most prolific contributors — a musician from outside San Diego named Michael Beatty, who goes by the handle Miguelifornia — mentioned that Mr. Scavino and Mr. Miller “gave us tons of great video” shot at a Trump rally in South Carolina.Days later, the team released a clip that appeared to use behind-the-scenes footage of Mr. Trump at a rally. The moody meme, cast in blue monochrome and set to a Phil Collins song, cast Mr. Trump as a serious, heroic leader and concluded with information on how to text a donation to the campaign.“This is a campaign ad if I’ve ever seen one,” one team member, who goes by MAGADevilDog, wrote on X.A Plan to Avoid ‘a Ton of Oversight’Because the Dilley Meme Team’s content is shared on the internet, rather than on television or radio, it generally isn’t subject to laws requiring ads to include disclosure about who paid for them.“If it goes on the internet, there’s essentially no regulation,” said Richard L. Hasen, an elections law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. And without regulation, he added, it’s impossible to know who is paying for the content.But campaign finance experts pointed to two other unknowns about the Dilley Meme Team’s operations: coordination and compensation.If a group is receiving compensation to help a candidate get elected, then it could be considered a super PAC and should be registered and reporting its donors and spending.If it is not compensated but is coordinating with the campaign, then it may run afoul of strict limits on in-kind contributions, said Paul S. Ryan, who serves as deputy executive director of the pro-democracy group Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation.Mr. Ryan said receiving video footage that was not publicly available could be considered coordination.Memes created with input from the campaign, he said, “are just as good as a direct contribution to the campaign” and may be worth far more than the $6,600 individual limit per election cycle.Mr. Dilley and other members of the meme team often claim they receive no financial compensation for their efforts.“Everything they do, they do it for free and out of love of country,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican strategist close to Mr. Trump, who frequently shares Dilley Meme Team posts.Mr. Dilley, who in 2019 was found to have failed to pay more than $24,000 in child support and interest, says he now makes “multiple six figures” a year. That income, he said on his podcast last month, comes from a combination of sources: podcast subscriptions and sponsors, sales of apparel, his life-coaching business and streaming revenue from the video platform Rumble, where the Dilley Show has more than 12,000 subscribers.“There’s nothing here that’s mysterious,” he said. “It’s all transparent.”Federal Election Commission records show no payments from any political committee to Mr. Dilley or other members of the meme team.Mr. Dilley has claimed to have received gifts from Mr. Trump. Last March, he posted video of a box filled with 28 Make America Great Again hats, each signed by the former president. The package was sent by the campaign in thanks for assisting with “rapid response” during President Biden’s State of the Union address, Mr. Dilley said.Signed MAGA hats can sell for as much as $1,000 on the secondary market.Mr. Dilley also said he got access to dozens of V.I.P. tickets to a Trump rally in Hialeah, Fla., on Nov. 8, which he gave to supporters of his show. It is unclear how much the tickets were worth, but tickets for other rallies have sold for as much as $1,500 apiece.Mr. Dilley has been clear that he is looking for more than just thank-you gifts.In October, he told his podcast audience that he wanted to use limited liability companies to receive money from Trump donors to fund his team’s work. The idea, he said, is to avoid “a ton of red tape” and “a ton of oversight” that come with operating as a super PAC or being paid by the campaign.“If you go super PAC or official campaign, you can get paid, but the problem is a lawyer has to watch every single thing you put out, and we don’t want that,” Mr. Dilley said on his podcast in October. “What we need is people that were going to give huge dollar amounts to the super PACs and the campaigns to just give directly to us.”“We already have L.L.C.s formed,” he added. “We’re ready to rock ’n’ roll.”Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer who advises both Democrats and Republicans, described that plan as “problematic” because it implies a clear goal of circumventing public disclosure as required by the F.E.C.“People can take advantage of those failures of the regulatory system to promote the interests of a candidate without the public ever being aware of it,” Mr. Kappel said. In that landscape, he added, “L.L.C.s have become the tool of choice” because they can be layered to obscure both the source and recipient of payments.The Dilley Meme Team was registered as a business in July, using the address of a UPS store outside Tampa, according to Florida business records. Mr. Dilley acknowledged being involved in its parent company, Counter Productions Digital Media L.L.C., which was registered at the same address in early 2022. He denies having said he set up any L.L.C.s to avoid campaign finance rules.On his podcast, Mr. Dilley has laid out his vision for his team, saying he hopes to hire all 27 meme team members full time through the 2024 election. “We need 12 months of everyone full time working to meme Donald Trump back into the White House while destroying Joe Biden,” he said.Jaymin Patel contributed research. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Casey DeSantis Invited Outsiders to Caucus in Iowa. The State Party Said No.

      by

      The Iowa Republican Party reminded supporters that only residents can vote in the first-in-the-nation caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15.Casey DeSantis, the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, drew criticism on Saturday from the rival campaign of former President Donald J. Trump for seeking to recruit out-of-state supporters to participate in the nation’s first Republican nominating contest.The backlash came a day after Ms. DeSantis, during a Fox News appearance with her husband, urged supporters from elsewhere to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” said Ms. DeSantis, who has been a key player in her husband’s campaign and was specifically addressing mothers and grandmothers who support him.But the call to action is at odds with caucus rules, according to the Republican Party of Iowa, which hours later said that nonresidents were barred from caucusing.“Remember: you must be a legal resident of Iowa and the precinct you live in and bring photo ID with you to participate in the #iacaucus!” the party wrote on the social media platform X.Mr. Trump’s campaign on Saturday accused the DeSantis campaign of spreading misinformation about the caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15. It suggested that the move was part of a broader scheme to change the outcome in the state, where polls show that Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has a significant lead.“The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the caucus through fraud,” the campaign said in a statement.In an email on Saturday, Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign, drew attention to comments made later on Friday by Ms. DeSantis on X, attempting to clarify her earlier remarks.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” Ms. DeSantis wrote.Mr. DeSantis also addressed the controversy while speaking to reporters on Friday in Iowa.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” he said. “They even let people go and speak on behalf of candidates, and they have all these precincts, so you may have people who really can speak strongly about our leadership that are going to come.”The Trump campaign continued to seize upon Ms. DeSantis’s remarks on Saturday, calling on Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and snubbed Mr. Trump, to clarify the caucus eligibility rules. It also demanded that Ms. Reynolds disavow the tactics promoted by Ms. DeSantis as “flagrantly wrong that could further disenfranchise caucusgoers.”A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.Kellen Browning More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Why Ron DeSantis Isn’t Beating Donald Trump

      by

      As he flails to reverse a polling decline that is beginning to resemble a rockslide, Gov. Ron DeSantis must be feeling a little clueless about why his political fortunes are crumbling so quickly. Attacking wokeness and bullying transgender people seemed to work so well in Florida, so why aren’t national Republicans in awe of the divisions he’s deepened? Making repeated appearances with racial provocateurs never stopped him from getting elected as governor, so why did he have to fire a young aide who inserted Nazi imagery into his own video promoting Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign?But the political bubble inhabited by Mr. DeSantis is so thick — symbolized by the hugely expensive private-plane flights that are draining his campaign of cash, since he and his wife, Casey, won’t sit with regular people in a commercial cabin — that he has been unable or unwilling to understand the brushoff he has received from donors and potential voters and make the changes he needs to become competitive with Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.For years, Mr. DeSantis has created an entire political persona out of a singular crusade against wokeness, frightening teachers and professors away from classroom discussions of race, defending a school curriculum that said there were benefits to slavery, claiming (falsely) that his anti-vaccine crusade worked and engaging in a pointless battle with his state’s best-known private employer over school discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. He had the support of the Florida Legislature and state Republican officials in most of his efforts and presumably believed that an image of a more effective and engaged Trump would help him beat the real thing.But it’s not working. A Monmouth University poll published on Tuesday showed Mr. Trump with a 20-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in a head-to-head match, and the advantage grew to more than 30 points when all the other candidates were thrown in. Major donors have started to sour on him, and The Times reported on Thursday that they are disappointed with his performance and the management of his campaign, which he says he will somehow reboot.“DeSantis has not made any headway,” wrote the poll’s director, Patrick Murray. “The arguments that he’d be a stronger candidate and a more effective president than Trump have both fallen flat.”The most obvious fault in his strategy is that you can’t beat Donald Trump if you don’t even criticize him, and Mr. DeSantis has said little about the multiple indictments piling up against the former president or about his character. Granted, there are downsides to a full-frontal attack on Mr. Trump at this point, as other Republicans have become aware, and Mr. DeSantis still needs to establish some kind of identity first. But he can’t become an alt-Trump without drawing a sharp contrast and holding Mr. Trump to account for at least a few of his many flaws. There are graveyards in Iowa and New Hampshire full of candidates who tried to ignore the leader through sheer force of personality, and even if he had one of those, Mr. DeSantis hasn’t demonstrated the skills to use it. Both men will speak Friday night at the Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, and if Mr. DeSantis leaves his rival unscathed, it’s hard to imagine how he goes the distance.The deeper problem, though, is that Mr. DeSantis is peddling the wrong message. Only 1 percent of voters think that wokeness and transgender issues are the country’s top problem, according to an April Fox News poll — essentially a repudiation of the governor’s entire brand. Race issues and vaccines are also low on the list.Lakshya Jain, who helps lead the website Split Ticket, which is doing some really interesting political analysis and modeling, said Mr. DeSantis misinterpreted what Florida voters were saying when they re-elected him by a 19-point margin in 2022.“The economy was doing well in Florida, and Democrats didn’t put up a good candidate in Charlie Crist,” Mr. Jain told me. “I’m not sure the majority of Florida voters really cared what he was saying on wokeness. It’s not really an issue people vote on.”The economy, naturally, is what people care most about, but Mr. DeSantis hasn’t said much about his plans to fight inflation (which is already coming down) or create more jobs (which is happening every month without his help). Clearly aware of the problem, he announced on Thursday that he would unfurl a Declaration of Economic Independence in a major speech in New Hampshire on Monday (a phrase as trite and tone-deaf as the name of his Never Back Down super PAC).That appears to be the first fruit of his campaign reboot, but there are good reasons he doesn’t like to stray from his rigid agenda, as demonstrated by his occasionally disastrous footsteps into foreign policy. Bashing Bidenomics means he’ll immediately have to come up with an excuse for why inflation is so much higher in Florida than the nation as a whole. Though the national inflation rate in May was 4 percent compared with a year earlier, it was 9 percent in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area for the same period and 7.3 percent in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area.The primary reason for that is the state’s housing shortage, an issue that Mr. DeSantis largely ignored during his first term and has only belatedly taken a few small steps to address. When the issue inevitably comes up on the campaign trail, you can bet that Mr. DeSantis will find some way of blaming it on President Biden. That way he can quickly pivot to his preferred agenda of rewriting Black history, questioning science and encouraging gun ownership.He really can’t help himself; just this week he said he might hire the noted anti-vaccine nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to work at the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then he got into an online fight with Representative Byron Donalds, Florida’s only Black Republican member of Congress, over the state’s astonishingly wrong curriculum on slavery, and a DeSantis spokesman called Mr. Donalds a “supposed conservative.”Great way to expand your base. Remind me: When does the reboot start?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Where Is Melania Trump Now?

      by

      The former first lady has mostly retreated from public view — and steered clear of the campaign trail — while her husband fights to return to the White House and faces increasing legal peril.Since leaving the White House, Melania Trump’s world has gotten smaller.Just how she likes it.Cloistered behind the gates of her three homes, she sticks to a small circle — her son, her elderly parents and a handful of old friends. She visits her hairdressers, consults with Hervé Pierre, her longtime stylist, and sometimes meets her husband for Friday night dinner at their clubs. But her most ardent pursuit is a personal campaign: helping her son, Barron, 17, with his college search.What she has not done, despite invitations from her husband, is appear on the campaign trail. Nor has she been at his side for any of his court appearances.These are the days of Melania Trump, former first lady, current campaign spouse and wife to one of the most divisive figures in American public life. Unlike her predecessors, there are no plans for a speaking tour, a book or a major expansion of her charitable efforts, most of which, people close to the Trumps say, are not fully visible to the public. In her post-presidential life, Mrs. Trump wants what she could not get in the White House: a sense of privacy.Those efforts to retreat from public life have been complicated by her husband, who has turned her once again into a candidate’s spouse. As Donald J. Trump faces a possible third indictment, she has remained steadfastly silent about his increasing legal peril.While she supports his presidential bid, Mrs. Trump has not appeared on the trail since Mr. Trump announced his campaign in November and did not utter a public word about his effort until May, when she endorsed him in an interview with Fox News Digital.“He has my support, and we look forward to restoring hope for the future and leading America with love and strength,” she said.Her absence is a striking difference from the start of the first Trump campaign, when Mrs. Trump, wearing a white strapless dress, descended the golden escalator in front of her husband at his campaign kickoff at Trump Tower.Mrs. Trump remains in touch and friendly with a small group of people from her time in the White House, including the designer Rachel Roy and Hilary Geary Ross, the prominent Palm Beach networker and wife of Wilbur L. Ross, the president’s former commerce secretary. She remains especially close with her parents, who have an apartment at Trump Tower in Manhattan and have been spotted at Trump events at Mar-a-Lago, the Trumps’ private club and residence.“From her point of view and her friends’ point of view, she’s been through a lot and she’s come out a strong independent woman,” said R. Couri Hay, a publicist, who was an acquaintance of Mrs. Trump’s in New York before she headed to Washington. “She’s learned how to close the door and close the shutters and remain private. We don’t see a lot, we don’t hear a lot.”Mrs. Trump declined an interview request. This account is based on a dozen interviews with associates, campaign aides and friends, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private details of her life.People close to the family say Mrs. Trump’s lack of public support should not be confused with disapproval or indifference. She remains defensive of her husband, sharing his belief that their family has been unfairly attacked. Deeply distrustful of the mainstream media, she is an avid reader of the Daily Mail online, tracking Mr. Trump’s coverage in the conservative British tabloid.Mrs. Trump is particularly skeptical of the case by E. Jean Carroll, who won $5 million in damages in a trial accusing Mr. Trump of sexual abuse in the 1990s and defamation after he left the White House, according to two people familiar with her remarks. When Mrs. Trump saw coverage of her husband’s deposition in the case, she was livid at his legal team for failing to do more to raise objections. She has also privately questioned why Ms. Carroll could not recall the precise date of the alleged assault.Still, Mrs. Trump believes that despite the legal peril, Mr. Trump could return to the White House next year. In private, she has expressed curiosity about Casey DeSantis, the wife of Mr. Trump’s chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Ms. DeSantis is a close adviser to her husband and a regular presence at his events, and she has begun to campaign for him on her own. In one of her rare interviews, Mrs. Trump mused to Fox News about having a second chance at being first lady, saying she would “prioritize the well-being and development of children” if she reprised the role.Mrs. Trump has privately expressed curiosity about Casey DeSantis, who has spent time campaigning with her husband, Ron DeSantis.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesBut she has not yet prioritized campaigning. Although she has expressed willingness to do events for her husband next year, she has so far refused his requests to join him on the stump.“I don’t think it’s going to be anything like what we’ve seen with Casey DeSantis,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump aide who quit on Jan. 6. “She’s not going to be throwing on jeans and walking in parades.”Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Trump adviser who is also close with Mrs. Trump, said the former first lady was “all in” on her husband’s candidacy and remained his “most trusted and most transparent adviser.” Both Trumps, she said, have privately discussed “priorities” for a second term.“I know few people as comfortable in their skin as Melania Trump,” said Ms. Conway, who is not working for the campaign. “She knows who she is and keeps her priorities in check. Melania keeps them guessing, and they keep guessing wrong.”That air of mystery extends to the gated communities of her husband’s clubs. In Palm Beach, Mrs. Trump is not a part of the social circuit, said Lore Smith, a longtime Palm Beach real estate agent who is a frequent visitor to the club.Unlike her modern predecessors, who attended barre or spinning classes, Mrs. Trump isn’t seen at the fitness center and isn’t known to have a trainer, according to other club regulars and former aides. She has long been a fan of days spent at the spa, but she is almost never spotted outside at the pool at either Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, Mr. Trump’s golf resort in New Jersey. Occasionally, she makes brief appearances at charity functions at Mar-a-Lago with her husband.“They very much keep to themselves behind the confines of Mar-a-Lago,” Ms. Smith said.Mrs. Trump isn’t part of the social scene at Mar-a-Lago, her husband’s private club. She is said to prefer New York. Saul Martinez for The New York TimesMrs. Trump remains closely involved with Barron’s education. He is enrolled in a private school in West Palm Beach and is beginning to look at colleges in New York.Mrs. Trump is said to prefer the city to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. She has been spotted going to her hairdresser and entering and exiting Trump Tower, which she does through a special side entrance and a private elevator.Outside the family residences, Mrs. Trump’s public schedule has been limited. She has done a handful of events, including collecting $500,000 in fees last year from the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative group that supports L.G.B.T. rights, and Fix California, an elections organization founded by Richard Grenell, a former senior Trump administration official. Mr. Grenell declined to comment on her appearance at the events.In February 2022, Mrs. Trump started “Fostering the Future,” a scholarship program for foster children aging out of the system. A person familiar with the program, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not offer details or disclose how many scholarships have been awarded, saying only that it was “more than two.” No charity with the name Fostering the Future or Be Best is registered in Florida or New York.Michael Weitzman, the first recipient of one of the scholarships, said he received the funding for four years at Oral Roberts University through a mentor, who knew a friend involved with the Trumps. “He asked if going to college was still a dream of mine,” said Mr. Weitzman, who spent his childhood living in 12 foster homes. “He said that he might know somebody really rich who might want to pay for me to go.”He did not fill out any kind of application but a day after the mentor floated the idea, he received an email from Mrs. Trump’s public relations team asking if he would participate in a Fox News interview with the former first lady, her first since leaving the White House. The scholarship was announced during the May 2022 interview, with Mr. Weitzman participating over Zoom. Mr. Weitzman, 26, said he had not had any interactions with Mrs. Trump since.”I haven’t met her in person. I wondered often if I would and would love to,” he said. “I’m beyond grateful. There’s no reason that anybody should have done this for me.”Mrs. Trump’s aides declined to discuss the details of her campaign plans, her charitable and business ventures and her views on her husband’s legal issues. Mr. Trump’s campaign declined to comment.Mrs. Trump and Barron Trump attended Mr. Trump’s campaign kickoff in November. Since then, Mrs. Trump has said little about her husband’s campaign for the White House. Andrew Harnik/Associated PressIn many ways, Mrs. Trump’s post-White House life is an extension of her style as first lady.From the start of her husband’s term, when she didn’t immediately move into the White House, Mrs. Trump often vacillated between two extremes: embracing her role or bucking all expectations associated with it.One of her most memorable moments was made through a fashion statement. While returning from a visit to a Texas border town to meet detained migrant children, she wore a jacket emblazoned with the phrase, “I really don’t care. Do U?”Much of her White House experience was marked by what people close to her described as disappointment and betrayal from friends, aides and even members of the Trump family. At times, her relationships with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, were strained, according to former aides. Since then, her former press secretary, Ms. Grisham, and a former aide and friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, have written tell-all books depicting her as icy and disengaged from the role.Those experiences pushed Mrs. Trump to retreat even further from the public, say people familiar with the family.Ms. Trump is “the most obviously unknowable first lady,” an author of a book on the subject said. “There’s something radical about it.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut that privacy may be hard to maintain under the scrutiny of a contested presidential primary and legal investigations.Last week, Chris Christie criticized both Trumps for a $155,000 payment to Mrs. Trump from a super PAC aligned with her husband’s campaign. A representative for the super PAC said that Mrs. Trump was hired in 2021 for “design consulting,” including choosing tableware, arranging settings and picking floral arrangements.“There’s grifting and then there’s Trump grifting,” Mr. Christie, the former New Jersey governor and most outspoken Trump critic in the 2024 Republican primary field, wrote on Twitter. “Undisputed champs.”Most of her public profile, conducted largely through her social media accounts, is focused on selling a variety of digital trading cards. Her NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, include digital drawings of her eyes, a broad-brimmed hat worn during a state visit, White House Christmas ornaments and a blue rose intended to commemorate National Foster Care Month.The majority of her tweets and Instagram posts directly promote the NFTs or a business called USA Memorabilia, which sells them. A day after Mr. Trump announced on his social media website Truth Social that he had received a target letter in the federal investigation into his efforts to thwart the transfer of power in 2020, Mrs. Trump’s only public comment was an announcement of a new “Man on the Moon” NFT collection.A portion of her proceeds is donated, though her aides would not provide details about the amount given or specify the charity.While first ladies often capitalize on the attendant fame, Mrs. Trump’s moneymaking venture is different from those of her predecessors, said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.”Michelle Obama was reportedly paid more than $60 million in a joint book deal with her husband, as well as commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches and signing a lucrative production deal with Netflix. Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton also sold their memoirs for millions. Their memoirs and paid speeches required the former first ladies to share some details about themselves, their views and their lives in the White House.By simply selling images, Mrs. Trump reveals nothing.That’s exactly how she likes it, Ms. Brower said.“She’s the most obviously unknowable first lady,” she said of Mrs. Trump’s public persona. “There’s something radical about it. First ladies are expected to want to please people and I’m not sure she really cares.”Maggie Haberman More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      A ‘Leaner-Meaner’ DeSantis Campaign Faces a Reboot and a Reckoning

      by

      The campaign’s missteps and swelling costs have made donors and allies anxious. One person close to the Florida governor said he had experienced a “challenging learning curve.”Throughout the spring, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his advisers waved off his sagging poll numbers with the simple fact that he wasn’t yet an actual candidate for president.Two months in, however, his sputtering presidential campaign is still struggling to gain traction.Allies are complaining about a lack of a coherent message about why Republican voters should choose Mr. DeSantis over former President Donald J. Trump. Early strategic fissures have emerged between his own political team and the enormous super PAC that will spend tens of millions of dollars to help him. His Tallahassee-based campaign has begun shedding some of the more than 90 workers it had hired — roughly double the Trump campaign payroll — to cut swelling costs that have included $279,000 at the Four Seasons in Miami.Now, his advisers are promising to reorient the DeSantis candidacy as an “insurgent” run and remake it into a “leaner-meaner” operation, days after the first public glimpse into his political finances showed unsustainable levels of spending — including a taste for private planes — and a fund-raising operation that was alarmingly dependent on its biggest contributors and that did not meet its expectations.One recent move that drew intense blowback, including from Republicans, was the campaign’s sharing of a bizarre video on Twitter that attacked Mr. Trump as too friendly to L.G.B.T.Q. people and showed Mr. DeSantis with lasers coming out of his eyes. The video drew a range of denunciations, with some calling it homophobic and others homoerotic before it was deleted.But it turns out to be more of a self-inflicted wound than was previously known: A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident.Mr. DeSantis has privately forecast that the now twice-indicted Mr. Trump would struggle as his legal troubles mounted, but the governor continues to poll in a distant second place nationally.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe DeSantis campaign declined to comment on specific questions about its spending, the candidate’s travel and the video. The communications director, Andrew Romeo, said in a statement that Mr. DeSantis was “ready to prove the doubters wrong again and our campaign is prepared to execute on his vision for the Great American Comeback.”“The media and D.C. elites have already picked their candidates — Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” Mr. Romeo said. “Ron DeSantis has never been the favorite or the darling of the establishment, and he has won because of it every time.”Second-guessing from political donors has intensified as Mr. DeSantis traveled this week from the Hamptons to Park City, Utah, to see donors. Records show the DeSantis campaign made an $87,000 reservation at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah for a retreat where donors were invited to cocktails on the deck on Saturday followed by an “investor appreciation dinner.” It’s the type of luxury location that helps explain how a candidate who has long preferred to fly by private jets burned through nearly 40 percent of every dollar he raised in his first six weeks without airing a single television ad.One senior DeSantis adviser who was supposed to oversee the campaign’s messaging on television recently departed, as the reality of a disappearing advertising budget set in. Now the governor is expected to hold smaller-scale events in early states while outsourcing some event planning to outside groups to tamp down costs. His team, for the second time in three months, is telegraphing a plan to engage more with the mainstream media he has long derided, calling it the “DeSantis is everywhere” approach.DeSantis supporters have watched anxiously as Mr. Trump has swamped the governor in coverage and outmaneuvered him in defining the contours of the race. Since his entry, Mr. DeSantis has received zero congressional endorsements. One person close to Mr. DeSantis, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a candidate whom the person still supports, said the governor had experienced a “challenging learning curve” that has left him “a little bit jarred.”In a note to donors on Thursday, Generra Peck, the DeSantis campaign manager, cast the campaign as making tough but necessary changes, writing that it would pursue an “underdog” approach going forward.“All DeSantis needs to drive news and win this primary is a mic and a crowd,” Ms. Peck wrote.Mr. DeSantis has privately forecast that the now twice-indicted Mr. Trump would struggle as his legal troubles mounted, but the governor continues to poll in a distant second place nationally.Ms. Peck, who has never worked at a senior level on a presidential campaign but made herself a trusted confidante of Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, has found herself under fire from both inside and outside a campaign that has been defined by silos, with various departments unaware of what is happening elsewhere. That the campaign did not hit expected fund-raising targets — and spent exorbitantly — caught the candidate and his wife by surprise, a person with knowledge of their reactions said.Mr. DeSantis still has time to reset. There have been no debates yet. His super PAC, which is called Never Back Down, brought in $130 million. And the first votes are nearly six months away in Iowa, where Mr. Trump has made missteps of his own.“Six months is a lifetime in politics,” said Terry Sullivan, who served as Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign manager, noting that in July 2015 Jeb Bush was still ahead in some polling averages. “He has definitely burned a lot of time, but it’s been a learning process for his campaign.”Mr. DeSantis remains the only challenger to Mr. Trump polling in the double digits, and the only candidate that Mr. Trump himself treats as a serious threat.“What would concern me is if I woke up one day and Trump and his team were not attacking Never Back Down and Ron DeSantis,” said Chris Jankowski, the DeSantis super PAC’s chief executive. “That would be concerning. Other than that, we’ve got them right where we want them.”Two developments — the campaign’s failure to hit expected fund-raising targets and its exorbitant spending — caught Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, by surprise, a person with knowledge of their reactions said.Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesA memo that hints at a splitStill, time is ticking. From the start, Mr. DeSantis has been trapped between the political reality that he is an underdog compared with the former president and the desire to project himself as a fellow front-runner separated from the rest of the G.O.P. pack.Mr. DeSantis himself acknowledged in a recent interview with Fox News that his earlier higher standing was only a “sugar high” from his landslide re-election and how that victory contrasted with the 2022 losses of several Trump-backed candidates.But the campaign has increasingly been tempted to punch down at lower-polling rivals, as in a memo to donors in early July that singled out Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as someone who would soon receive “appropriate scrutiny.”That campaign memo landed at the pro-DeSantis super PAC’s Atlanta headquarters with a thud. It seemed to rebuke the super PAC, calling into question the group’s decision to stay off the airwaves in New Hampshire and the pricey Boston market. Legally, super PACs and campaigns cannot coordinate strategy in private, so leaked memos are one way they communicate.“We will not cede New Hampshire,” read one line that appeared in boldface for extra emphasis. In a reference to Boston, the memo read, “We see no reason why more expensive markets in New Hampshire should not also be prioritized.”But the super PAC, which has studied the memo line by line, may be unmoved by the suggestions. “We’re not easily going to change our course,” said one senior official with the DeSantis super PAC who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about strategic decisions.According to a person with direct knowledge of the process, the memo, first published by NBC News, was written by Ms. Peck, but without the input or knowledge of the broader campaign leadership team, an unusual move for such a highly scrutinized document.The candidate himself soon made clear that he, too, wanted to see changes.“I can’t control” the super PAC, Mr. DeSantis said recently on Fox News, before adding some specific stage directions. “I imagine they’re going to start lighting up the airwaves pretty soon with a lot of good stuff about me, and that’s going to give us a great lift,” he said.Since then, the super PAC has not aired a positive ad about Mr. DeSantis or returned to the airwaves in New Hampshire.‘He brought over almost his entire state apparatus’From the moment Mr. DeSantis entered the race with a two-day event at the ritzy Four Seasons in Miami, his team operated on the false premise that he could campaign the same way he did as governor, when Florida’s lax campaign finance rules allowed him to collect million-dollar donations and borrow the private planes of friends at will.Mr. DeSantis raised a robust $20 million in less than six weeks. But $3 million of that is earmarked for a general election and cannot be spent now, and his spending rate averaged more than $212,000 per day.The state of the campaign’s finances could be even more bleak than the snapshot presented in public filings. Some vendors did not show up on the report at all, suggesting some bills have been delayed, which would make the books look rosier.There were also signs of a severe slowdown in his online donations. In Mr. DeSantis’s first week as a candidate, in late May, his campaign paid significantly more in fees to WinRed, the main donation-processing platform for Republicans that receives a cut of every online dollar donated, than it did in the entire month of June.In addition to the roughly 10 staff members who were let go in mid-July, two more senior advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, left this month to work for an outside nonprofit that can boost Mr. DeSantis.“He brought over almost his entire state apparatus, and I think they looked at it and said we don’t need all of those people,” said Hal Lambert, a Republican donor who is raising money for the DeSantis campaign.The disclosures also exposed Mr. DeSantis’s dependence on his biggest contributors. Only 15 percent of his contributions came from donors who gave less than $200. Even more stark is that the lion’s share of his money came from donors who gave the legal maximum in the primary of $3,300.Mr. DeSantis raised a robust $20 million in less than six weeks. But his spending rate averaged more than $212,000 per day.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThe challenge for Mr. DeSantis in relying so heavily on bigger donors is twofold: It means that he must travel the country extensively to attend fund-raisers to gather their larger checks and that those big donors cannot give to him more than once. That the governor and his wife prefer to travel by private planes adds significant costs, and cuts into the net money raised when crisscrossing the nation for fund-raisers.His report showed $179,000 in chartered plane costs, along with $483,000 to a limited liability company that was formed within days of his campaign kickoff, with the expenditure only labeled “travel.” A senior campaign official said the campaign planned to make changes to travel practices “to maximize our capabilities,” though the person would not specify what changes were coming.One way to save on air travel is to have Mr. DeSantis burrow deeper into Iowa, where officials say he may visit all 99 counties.“He is positioned to do well in Iowa,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in the state, whose group, The Family Leader, hosted Mr. DeSantis and other candidates in Iowa for a recent forum. (Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC paid $50,000 to the group’s foundation, records show, which a super PAC official said was for a sponsorship of the event.)The DeSantis super PAC emphasized that after being overwhelmed by Mr. Trump in free media coverage and millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads, Mr. DeSantis was still standing.“Any other candidate would be bleeding on the ground,” said Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer. “DeSantis,” she added, “is still No. 2.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump and DeSantis Are Battling for Iowa Voters. And for Its Governor, Too.

      by

      When Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor of Iowa, stopped by a donor retreat that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida held last year, no one paid it much mind.When she sat earlier this year with Mr. DeSantis onstage, at another donor gathering down the road from Donald J. Trump’s residence, people began to notice. When she glowingly appeared with Mr. DeSantis not once, not twice, but at all three of his first visits to her state this year, eyebrows arched. And by the time Ms. Reynolds appeared on Thursday alongside Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, alarms inside the Trump headquarters were blaring.Ms. Reynolds has said — including privately, to Mr. Trump — that she does not plan to formally endorse a candidate in the presidential race, in keeping with a tradition that the Iowa governor stays on the sidelines, keeping the playing field level for the first G.O.P. nominating contest. But through her words and deeds, Ms. Reynolds seems to be softening the ground in Iowa for Mr. DeSantis, appearing to try to create the conditions for an opening for him to take on Mr. Trump.For Mr. DeSantis, Iowa is where his allies acknowledge he must first halt Mr. Trump’s momentum to prevent him from steam-rolling his way to a third consecutive G.O.P. nomination. For Mr. Trump, it is where he hopes to snuff out his challengers’ candidacies, and win where he did not in 2016.And there is no politician in Iowa with greater sway than Ms. Reynolds, 63, who has overseen her party’s swelling state legislative majorities with an approval rating among Republicans near 90 percent. Republicans say she can command attention and shape the landscape even without making a formal endorsement.“I mean I think Kim could be considered for just about anything that a president would pick,” Mr. DeSantis said, when asked by a television interviewer if he’d consider Ms. Reynolds for a potential cabinet post.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMs. Reynolds has appeared alongside other candidates — including Mr. Trump, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott — but the warmth of her embrace of Mr. DeSantis has become conspicuous. It has been the subject of internal Trump campaign discussions — it has not escaped their notice that one of her senior political advisers, Ryan Koopmans, is also a top DeSantis super PAC adviser — and even public fulminations from the former president.“I hate to say it, without me, you know, she was not going to win, you know that, right?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Reynolds when he campaigned in Iowa in June.The Republican crowd, notably, did not applaud that off-key remark, which came only months after Ms. Reynolds had romped to re-election, carrying 95 of the state’s 99 counties. But the claim spoke to the former president’s self-centered view of the world: That it was his appointment of her predecessor, Terry Branstad, as his ambassador to China that cleared the way for Ms. Reynolds, then Mr. Branstad’s lieutenant governor, to take the state’s top job.Ms. Reynolds is said to have tired of Mr. Trump, and she reacted with disbelief to his comment that she owed him her governorship, according to people familiar with her thinking and her response. Still, she sided with Mr. Trump after his most recent indictment, lashing out at the Biden administration and saying it was a “sad day for America.”The two do have a shared history: Ms. Reynolds narrowly won a full term in 2018 with only 50.3 percent of the vote after Mr. Trump held a late rally for her, hailing her as “someone who has become a real star in the Republican Party.” More recently, however, Mr. Trump has been privately complaining about Ms. Reynolds and other prominent Republicans, who he feels owe him their endorsements because of his past support.Before Mr. Trump’s latest visit to Iowa on Friday, a behind-the-scenes standoff played out for days over whether Ms. Reynolds would join him. Ms. Reynolds has said she will make an effort to appear with whomever invites her, but an aide said she had not actually been invited. The Trump team sees her as having a standing invitation. Ultimately, she did not attend.The relationship with Mr. DeSantis, who has privately courted Ms. Reynolds for many months, has been strikingly different.He calls her Kim.She calls him Ron.They banter with a degree of familiarity and friendship that Mr. DeSantis rarely flashes with other politicians. People who know them say they forged a bond during the coronavirus pandemic, as two governors who pressed to open their states over the warnings of some public health officials. They sat down for a private dinner in March, on his first visit to Iowa this year, according to two people briefed on the meal, and in 2022 Mr. DeSantis called Ms. Reynolds to offer his encouragement ahead of her State of the Union response.When Mr. DeSantis was asked by a local television interviewer on his first trip to Iowa as a presidential candidate if he’d consider Ms. Reynolds for a potential cabinet post, he offered a surprisingly expansive answer, suggestive of something even more lofty: “I mean I think Kim could be considered for just about anything that a president would pick.”At times, she has had the look of a running mate.Appearing with Mr. DeSantis at three of his four visits to Iowa this year, and now with his wife as well, Ms. Reynolds has extolled Florida’s achievements under his leadership and connected his state’s successes to Iowa’s. The two lavish compliments on each other, and their talking points echo in perfect harmony.He says Florida is “the Iowa of the Southeast.” She says Iowa is “the Florida of the North.”In her introduction at his kickoff event, she made a point of specifically praising Mr. DeSantis for signing a six-week abortion ban, which Mr. Trump has criticized.“He proudly signed a law that makes it illegal to stop a baby’s beating heart — the same heartbeat bill that I was proud to sign,” she said of Mr. DeSantis.Some Iowa Republicans said Ms. Reynolds is simply being a gracious host.“She’s very popular but I don’t think she’s playing favorites,” said Steve Scheffler, one of the state’s Republican National Committee members and the president of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. “People read way too much into this.”Mr. Trump has been privately complaining about Ms. Reynolds and other prominent Republicans, who he feels owe him their endorsements because of his past support. Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut Trump advisers have snickered privately about her having neutrality-in-name-only. “She is quote unquote neutral,” said a person close to Mr. Trump, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the team’s thinking, which is that Ms. Reynolds will do whatever she can to help Mr. DeSantis short of endorsing him.The Washington bureau chief for Breitbart News, Matthew Boyle, who is known for his close relationship with the former president, glaringly left Ms. Reynolds off his recent list of 14 Republicans Mr. Trump could pick as his 2024 running mate.Mr. Trump has some well-placed allies in Iowa — the state party chairman’s son, who is in the legislature, is among his paid advisers — and he is seeking more. On his June visit to the state, he invited a small group of prominent Republican officials whose endorsements are still up for grabs out for dinner at a steakhouse in downtown Des Moines, among them the state’s attorney general, according to people who attended the meal.In an interview, Mr. Branstad, the former Iowa governor, described the Trump-Reynolds relationship as “cordial,” praised Ms. Reynolds as a popular and effective governor and said her formal neutrality was good for all Iowans. He urged the former president to overcome his irritation.“Trump has got to get over it,” Mr. Branstad said. “He’s got to get over the jealousy and resentment and focus on the future. You win elections by focusing on the future and not the past.”There has been no recent independent polling in Iowa. In national surveys, Mr. Trump has led Mr. DeSantis by a wide margin.Ms. Reynolds is not just the governor of Iowa: She also presides over the Republican Governors Association, the nationwide campaign arm for Republicans seeking governorships. Both her elected G.O.P. counterparts leading the Senate and House campaign arms have already endorsed Mr. Trump.Yet like other prominent Iowa elected officials, Ms. Reynolds has made it clear that her primary goal is to ensure that Iowa keeps its “first in the nation” status. At a college-football game last fall in Iowa, Ms. Reynolds was in a V.I.P. box mingling with members of the state’s congressional delegation as they discussed the importance of staying “neutral” to protect Iowa’s enviable position at the top of the Republican voting calendar, according to a person present for the conversation (Democrats took away the state’s leadoff spot in 2024).“We aren’t going to get involved in campaigns, because we want everybody to feel welcome in Iowa,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the 89-year-old Republican senior statesman, said in an interview. “And if the governor were to back somebody, that may discourage other people from coming. Same way for me.”Casey DeSantis traveled to Iowa on Thursday, making her first solo appearance in her husband’s presidential campaign at an event with Ms. Reynolds.Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesBut there is some burbling frustration with Mr. Trump inside the delegation.Last month, Mr. Trump skipped the signature “Roast and Ride” event organized by Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. His campaign had expressed interest in sending videotaped remarks, and Ms. Ernst’s operation then rented large screens for the purpose of showing them, but he never sent a video — leaving Ms. Ernst’s team without a recording, and the cost of the equipment to cover, according to five people briefed on the incident.Ms. Ernst’s team had planned on using the chance to win a motorcycle helmet signed by all of the Republican candidates as a lure to sell tickets to the “Roast and Ride.” They sent the helmet to Mr. Trump, who returned it later than expected and had added the numbers “45” and “47,” signaling he would be the 47th president, the role everyone else is also running for, according to two people with knowledge of the episode. They never used the helmet.In March of this year, Ms. Reynolds did introduce Mr. Trump at an event. In a private meeting during that same trip, Ms. Reynolds stressed to Mr. Trump that her focus was on maintaining Iowa’s place as the first state in the nation on the campaign calendar, according to a person familiar with what took place but who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. Mr. Trump responded by telling her that he was the one who had protected the caucuses’ leadoff position, as president. (The Iowa caucuses have begun the nominating process since the 1970s.)At their joint event on Thursday, Ms. Reynolds and Ms. DeSantis bantered onstage and even exchanged a high-five.“I am a woman on a mission,” Ms. Reynolds said at one point, “and I think you are a woman on a mission, too.”Lisa Lerer More