DeSantis, Ron

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      Major G.O.P. Donor’s Commitment to DeSantis Is Murkier Than Thought

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      The hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, who seemed set to be a powerful financial backer of the Florida governor, is said to still be evaluating the Republican primary race.Nearly six months ago, Kenneth Griffin, the Republican megadonor and hedge fund executive, seemed poised to be a powerful financial backer of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his anticipated run for president.Mr. Griffin had given $5 million to Mr. DeSantis’s re-election effort, and he told Politico that while Mr. DeSantis was not yet a White House candidate, “he has a tremendous record as governor of Florida, and our country would be well served by him as president.”These days, Mr. Griffin is keeping his cards closer to the vest, and his intentions are harder to discern. A person familiar with his thinking, noting that Mr. DeSantis had not yet made his run official, said Mr. Griffin was still evaluating the Republican primary race as it unfolded.The financier and Mr. DeSantis met in Florida in the last two weeks, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, which came as Mr. Griffin has taken issue in private conversations with some of Mr. DeSantis’s policy moves and pronouncements. In particular, the two people said, Mr. Griffin was deeply troubled by Mr. DeSantis’s statements that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a “territorial dispute” — a remark he later tried to clarify — and that the war was not a vital U.S. interest.Mr. Griffin, who has made clear that he wants to move on from former President Donald J. Trump, was also disconcerted by a six-week abortion ban in Florida that Mr. DeSantis recently signed, according to the people familiar with Mr. Griffin’s thinking, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. Last year, Mr. Griffin moved his hedge fund, Citadel, to Miami from Chicago, citing crime concerns.The meeting between the governor and Mr. Griffin was, for the most part, one on one, without staff members, one of the people briefed on it said, and it was one of their few direct interactions. Reading Mr. Griffin’s intentions after the meeting has been difficult for some people close to him.One person predicted the financier was still likely to donate to Mr. DeSantis once he made his candidacy official, which could happen as early as next month. But the person said Mr. Griffin might also give to other candidates who seemed able to defeat Mr. Trump.In a statement, Zia Ahmed, a spokesman for Mr. Griffin, ticked off Mr. DeSantis’s “many accomplishments” and mentioned job creation, “increasing the number of quality school options, and prioritizing the safety of our communities.”He went on, “Ken may not agree with all of the governor’s policies, but he appreciates all that the governor has done to make Florida one of the most attractive states to live and work in America.”Kenneth Griffin has made clear that he would like the Republican Party to move beyond former President Donald J. Trump.Mike Blake/ReutersBut Mr. Ahmed declined to address what Mr. Griffin thought about the presidential race. A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment.What Mr. Griffin does is being closely watched, after word spread of his unhappiness about how Mr. DeSantis had comported himself early this year.Mr. DeSantis’s supporters say there is still a broad appetite — in the donor community and among prospective voters — for a viable Republican alternative to Mr. Trump.“The money has walked,” said Roy Bailey, a Dallas businessman and longtime Republican fund-raiser for Mr. Trump. “From my conversations with a lot of people from around the country, it has moved to DeSantis. It is a cold, hard fact.”Mr. Bailey disputed the idea that momentum had shifted away from Mr. DeSantis recently.In the first two weeks of May, Mr. DeSantis is set to host a series of small dinners with major donors and supporters from across the country at the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, according to two people with knowledge of his plans.If Mr. DeSantis enters the presidential race as expected, he will be armed with a well-funded super PAC, Never Back Down, which said this month that it had raised $30 million in its first few weeks of fund-raising.Two-thirds of that money, $20 million, came from a single donor, the Nevada hotel magnate Robert Bigelow, Time magazine reported.In private conversations, Mr. DeSantis’s associates have indicated that they have $100 million in commitments to the super PAC, along with roughly $82 million in a Florida committee that will probably be transferred to Never Back Down.Still, some donors who had hoped Mr. DeSantis could stop Mr. Trump have cooled their enthusiasm.Thomas Peterffy, a prominent conservative donor, also cited Florida’s abortion law in explaining why he was withholding support from Mr. DeSantis for now. Mr. Peterffy had supported Mr. DeSantis in his state campaigns, and according to one person familiar with the event, hosted Mr. DeSantis at his house early in his first term as governor. But Mr. Peterffy told The Financial Times this month he was holding still, as were some friends.Some donors have also expressed concern about Mr. DeSantis’s pre-campaign strategy. When his allies made clear this year that he would not enter the race before the end of the legislative session in Florida, Mr. DeSantis effectively gave Mr. Trump three months to define him — and taunt him — before becoming a candidate. More

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      Ron DeSantis Praises U.S.-Japan Ties on Visit to Tokyo

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      The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, had a chance to buff up his foreign policy credentials, after criticism from fellow Republicans over his comments on Ukraine.On his first overseas trip since 2019, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and presumptive Republican presidential candidate, met with the Japanese prime minister on Monday and said he hoped the United States would stand by Japan “every step of the way” as it bolstered its defenses to meet rising challenges from North Korea and China.“I’m a big supporter of the U.S.- Japan alliance,” Mr. DeSantis, standing beside his wife, Casey DeSantis, said in brief remarks to reporters in Tokyo after a 30-minute meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. “I think Japan’s been a heck of an ally for our country, and I think a strong Japan is good for America, and I think a strong America is good for Japan.”Mr. DeSantis’s comments appeared to depart from the stance taken by Donald J. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination. Before becoming president in 2017, Mr. Trump attacked Japan over its trade policy and accused it of exploiting its military alliance with the United States to protect itself at low risk and minimal cost.Mr. DeSantis has not yet announced a presidential campaign but is widely expected to run, even as his prospects of winning the primary race have seemed to dim in recent months. Mr. Trump, who once trailed Mr. DeSantis in some polls, is now firmly ahead and is consolidating endorsements from Florida’s congressional delegation.When asked about those polls on Monday, Mr. DeSantis said he was “not a candidate,” adding “we’ll see if and when that changes.”For an American governor to have a meeting with the Japanese prime minister — especially so close to the Group of 7 summit being held next month in Hiroshima — is considered unusual. Mr. DeSantis’s trip offered him a chance to buff up his foreign policy credentials, which are in need of positive headlines.After a recent foray into foreign policy matters, Mr. DeSantis found himself facing major criticism from fellow Republicans, who attacked him for calling Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine a “territorial dispute” that was not a vital U.S. national security interest. (He quickly backtracked.)Mr. DeSantis applauded Japan’s efforts to bolster its military.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWhile Mr. DeSantis has not spoken comprehensively about his foreign policy philosophy, some of his views emerged during his time in the House, including a stint on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Former colleagues there described him as expressing a hard-nosed and narrow view of how the United States should wield power abroad, leaving him difficult to classify as either a hawk or an isolationist.On Monday, Mr. DeSantis applauded Japan’s recent efforts to double its military spending to eventually approach 2 percent of the country’s economic output. He pointed to threats in the region that he said included “not only the C.C.P. but also Kim Jong-un,” a reference to the Chinese Communist Party and the leader of North Korea.Mr. DeSantis called for more military investment by the United States, too. “If you look at our stockpiles and some of the things that have happened over the last few years, there’s a lot of room for improvement on our end as well,” he said.Given his history, Mr. DeSantis’s remarks in Tokyo will be closely parsed. In both Japan and South Korea, “there is great concern about possible outcomes of the U.S. election,” said Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.“They are concerned about an isolationist U.S. president who can continue or resume the previous president’s threats to withdraw troops from Japan and South Korea,” he said.Yujin Yaguchi, a professor of American studies at the University of Tokyo, said that Japan was “an easy place” to venture for a U.S. politician with little foreign policy experience, given the warm relations between the two countries.He added that Japanese officials might have been particularly interested in giving Mr. DeSantis a warm reception because an increasing number of people in Japan regard the possibility of another Trump presidency with “fascination, dismay and fear.”Mr. DeSantis has ceded his lead in polls for the Republican presidential nomination.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesKoichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo, cautioned against reading too much into Mr. DeSantis’s comments about the U.S.-Japan alliance or Japan’s military efforts. With his inexperience in foreign policy, Mr. DeSantis may be saying “everything that the Japanese government would want to hear,” Mr. Nakano said.Mr. Nakano also said it might have been easier for Mr. Kishida to meet with Mr. DeSantis now, before he is an official candidate, to avoid the appearance of endorsing his candidacy.On trade, Mr. DeSantis said he was seeking to establish new economic ties between Florida and Japan, the state’s seventh-largest trading partner. He said that he would be meeting with officials from Japan’s two largest airlines to encourage them to establish direct flights from Tokyo to Florida.“We’ve got over 100 Japanese companies” in Florida, Mr. DeSantis told reporters, “but if you look at, like, Atlanta in Georgia, they’ve got 400 or 500 Japanese companies, and I think a large part of the reason is they have a direct flight into Atlanta. So that would be really good, I think, to deepen our economic ties if we could get direct transportation.”Mr. DeSantis’s trip, which will include stops in Seoul, Israel and London, is being paid for by Enterprise Florida, the state’s public-private economic development agency. Private donations to the agency usually provide the funding for travel costs.Foreign trade has not appeared to be a priority for the governor this year. His legislative agenda focused on red meat for his conservative base, including further restricting abortion, expanding gun rights and banning diversity and equity programs at state universities. He did not mention foreign trade in his State of the State address last month.Mr. DeSantis departed the state two days after asking the Biden administration to declare a major disaster in Broward County, following catastrophic flooding that caused a severe gasoline shortage in South Florida. More

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      Republican 2024 Hopefuls Gather in Iowa Without Trump and DeSantis

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      Republicans gathered in the state Saturday in a kickoff event that lacked the attendance of two front-runners, though their presence was felt.More than nine months before the Iowa caucuses, eight declared and potential presidential candidates came to a gathering of Christian conservatives on Saturday evening to test a question: Can flesh-and-blood politicians eyeing the highest office in the land be upstaged by a canned, prerecorded video?The answer was almost certainly yes.The audio did not quite match the video on former President Donald J. Trump’s recorded message to the hundreds gathered at the largest cattle call yet of the fledgling campaign season. The delivery of his trademark hyperbole was rushed to fit into the final, 10-minute window that closed the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff.But the reception given to the man who wasn’t there was strikingly different from the applause given to those who were, and the candidates who bothered to make the trip barely bothered to try to knock the front-runner from his perch.Their strategy appeared straightforward: Avoid confrontation with the better known, better funded front-runners, hope Mr. Trump’s attacks take out — or at least take down — Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is second in most Republican polls, and hope outside forces, namely indictments, take out Mr. Trump.Then it’s anybody’s game.“I think it’s going to come down to me and Donald Trump very soon in this race,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author, said in an interview before delivering an address in which the former president’s name was not uttered. “I know that may sound odd to folks like you who are tracking the present, but if you’re going to see where the puck is going, there’s a hunger for an outsider.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author, did not mention former President Donald J. Trump during his address at the event.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressThe Iowa conservatives who attended the events on Saturday swore they were open to a Republican nominee not named Trump. They munched on Chick-fil-A sandwiches, listened attentively and were eager to talk politics eight years after the last real Republican presidential contest in Iowa.“I like to see them battle it out,” said Dan Applegate, a former co-chairman of the Dallas County, Iowa, G.O.P. “The good candidates are the ones who can make it through.”Former Vice President Mike Pence made an appearance, greeted like a celebrity by potential voters though his pitch for military aid to Ukraine garnered a tepid response. So was Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, and some others who were far below the radar, like the radio personality Larry Elder, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman-turned-conservative gadfly, and a businessman named Perry Johnson.Mr. Johnson, in fact, was the only speaker to challenge a front-runner by name when he concluded his remarks: “I just want to say, DeSantis is making a huge mistake by not coming here. And I don’t understand it, but each to his own.”Otherwise, the hopefuls just wanted to avoid the candidates who opted not to come in person.“It’s about being able to deliver a message that resonates and recognizing that we want a tomorrow that will be better than yesterday. We want a next year that needs to be better,” said Mr. Hurd, on his first trip ever to Iowa, “and I think anybody who taps into that, regardless of the competition, can be can be successful.”It is early in the race, extremely early. In April 2015, two months before Mr. Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy, those gathered at the same Faith and Freedom forum had no idea what was about to hit them. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida warned of the metastasizing threat of Islamic jihadists. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky fretted over Common Core, a long-forgotten concern about the nationalization of school curriculums.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas railed against a Supreme Court that was one vote away from ordering small businesses to serve gay couples, while Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, bragged that under his leadership, his state had ended abortions after 20 weeks, a threshold that would be considered the height of timidity in the post-Roe v. Wade G.O.P.Former Vice President Mike Pence was greeted as a celebrity by attendees at the event.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesOnce Mr. Trump entered, those issues would be swept away by his peculiar brand of personality politics and name calling.This time, the potential candidates know exactly what they are up against, but they just didn’t address it. Mr. Pence fretted over “radical gender ideology” and pupils penalized for improper pronouns. Mr. Scott, preaching his trademark optimism and unity, nonetheless warned that “the radical left, they are selling the drug of victimhood and the narcotic of despair.”In private, Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that true voters of faith could see through Mr. Trump’s assumed trappings of religiosity, and he castigated Mr. DeSantis for refusing to sit down with news outlets he deems ideologically hostile and to speak on college campuses. In public, he was far more oblique, declining to name names when he said that if a conservative could not bring himself to visit a college campus, he probably should not be sitting across a negotiating table with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.Mr. Trump could give the audience what it was looking for, hailing the overturning of Roe v. Wade — “nobody thought it was going to happen” — and the most anti-abortion presidency ever, while promising to “obliterate the deep state,” hunt down “the radical zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education.” He concluded, “The left-wing gender lunacy being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse, and it will stop immediately.”It went over well. Paul Thurmond, a 65-year-old from Des Moines, chatted amiably and shook hands with Mr. Pence as the former vice president made his way from table to table. But Mr. Thurmond, though he said he was open-minded, was clearly partial to Mr. Trump.“Right now, I think Pence is too nice a guy,” he said. “He won’t be able to contend with the evil that the Democrats will rain down on him.” More

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      DeSantis Faces Republican Scrutiny on Issues While Trump Skates By

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      Republican voters seem to be grading Donald Trump on a curve in his third presidential campaign, while Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida faces a more traditional form of scrutiny.When former President Donald J. Trump called Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, “smart” in the days after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the remark caused a brief media stir and nothing more — another off-the-cuff, provocative statement from someone who is famous for such comments.But when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida painted the fight in far less extreme terms, as a “territorial dispute,” the reaction from Republicans in Washington and a range of donors was alarm and anger.When the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling was undone by the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Trump — who appointed three of the justices responsible for overturning it after promising to do so during his 2016 campaign — acted like a bystander, telling allies it could be bad for Republicans electorally and blaming anti-abortion forces for losses in the 2022 midterm campaigns.Since then, he has refused to say where he stands on federal action curtailing abortion, an issue on which he has changed his position over the years. Yet Mr. DeSantis faced extensive backlash from voters whose support he might need in a general election when he moved to the right of Mr. Trump and signed a law banning abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy.Mr. Trump, a rich businessman and celebrity who served four years as president and is now running his third campaign, is something of a known unknown commodity. For the last eight years, a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump as a political figure has been that he is graded on something of a curve, his more outrageous comments striking some voters as musings rather than as deeper views on policy.“He has never adhered to the unwritten rules of electoral politics, and he has cemented his MAGA brand by openly flouting them,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “In 2016, Trump was exempt from the punitive standards we hold conventional politicians to, and what’s remarkable is that seven years and a presidential term later, that still holds true.”Voters, Mr. Donovan said, see Mr. Trump “differently, and make exceptions, consciously or otherwise, for his statements and his behavior.”That defined Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, when a series of candidates flamed out in the Republican primaries as they were judged by traditional standards against a rival who actively sought to burn down those standards.And if Mr. Trump is succeeds in winning the nomination again, the degree to which he is viewed through a fundamentally different lens from those applied to other politicians will be a significant reason. Support for the primary campaign by Mr. Trump — who last month earned the dubious distinction of being the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges — has only increased.By contrast, Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman and current governor, is being held to the standards of a typical politician, just as all of those who unsuccessfully tried to stop Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were. And against those conventional standards, in his first foray onto the national stage, Mr. DeSantis has been struggling.Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking in Doral, Fla., last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesHe has made a series of unforced errors that have been the focus of news coverage and have caused public and private alarm among Republican donors who saw him as the antidote to Mr. Trump.Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has gone from decades of being active in New York politics to running as an outsider in 2016, followed by an ascent to party leader as president, and is now racking up endorsements from political elites as the front-runner for the Republican nomination.Mr. Trump has for decades engaged in the kind of glad-handing that benefits candidates — which Mr. DeSantis is said to eschew — such as working phones, sending notes and attending events. He also has the ability to invite people on a private plane or to an opulent members-only club.Mr. Trump also has the advantage of celebrity, and over the course of his presidency, his base became conditioned to dismiss his contradictory policy impulses and statements as just the way Mr. Trump talks.By contrast, Mr. DeSantis’s words and actions harden as soon as they happen, which Mr. Trump plays to his advantage.Recently, Mr. Trump mocked Mr. DeSantis for describing Mr. Putin as “basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons” in a March interview with the broadcaster Piers Morgan. Mr. Trump put out a campaign video in which he defended Mr. Putin and attacked Mr. DeSantis for offering “exactly the kind of simple-minded thinking that has produced decades of failed diplomacy and ultimately war.”Yet in his own interview with Mr. Morgan last year, Mr. Trump agreed when the interviewer described Mr. Putin as an “evil genocidal monster” amid the devastating scenes in Ukraine.“I do” agree with that assessment, Mr. Trump said in response to Mr. Morgan’s prodding. “And who wouldn’t?”Yet in segments with conservative media outlets, Mr. DeSantis often faces criticism that Mr. Trump does not.Shortly after Mr. DeSantis’s interview with Mr. Morgan on Russia, the influential Fox News host Tucker Carlson took issue with his calling Mr. Putin a “war criminal,” without mentioning that Mr. Trump had described him in even harsher terms.Jason Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, said that the former president has an ability “to bypass the filter of political media and build a personal relationship directly with voters.” He described it as a “sense of familiarity” forged through Mr. Trump’s time in business and entertainment and noted that Mr. Trump had brought millions of nontraditional voters to the table.For the most part, Mr. Trump’s 2024 rivals have avoided taking him on directly by name, or challenging his presidency. The exception is Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, who is traveling in advance of a possible campaign of his own and who laid out a series of policy failures he said Mr. Trump had committed as president.“All of those failings are policy failings, but they’re bigger than that,” Mr. Christie said at a town hall in New Hampshire on Thursday night. “They’re broken promises.”Whether such a line of attack will stick remains to be seen. But it is at odds with how Mr. DeSantis has approached the race so far, some Republican strategists say.“DeSantis’s flawed strategy so far has been to try to beat Trump by out-Trumping Trump without understanding that he’s going to be graded on a conventional curve,” Rob Stutzman, a California-based operative, said, suggesting that Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to formally enter the race in the coming weeks, needed a course correction. “Only Trump rides the Trump curve.” More

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      DeSantis’s Puddin’ Head Campaign

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      WASHINGTON — Back in the more openly sexist days of Hollywood, writers would get notes on their scripts about women characters. The studio suits would ask questions like, “Can they go to a strip club here?” or “Can you chain her to a wall?”The most common note from male executives was, “Make the girl more likable.”No doubt Ron DeSantis’s advisers are getting notes from donors these days with the message, “Make the guy more likable.”As David Axelrod told me, the Florida governor is coming across like “the high school quarterback who throws the geek against the lockers to get a laugh from the cheerleaders — and that’s not a good look.”He said DeSantis is learning a lesson: “The kind of tricks you use to get elected to other offices don’t work in a presidential race because you get scrutinized so closely.”Even in a world made crueler by social media and Donald Trump, DeSantis seems mean, punching out at Mickey Mouse, immigrants, gays and women; pushing through an expansion of his proposal to ban school discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity to include all grades, as well as a draconian ban on abortion after six weeks. He even admonished some high school kids during the pandemic for wearing masks. On Thursday, DeSantis signed a bill cutting the number of jurors needed to give a defendant the death sentence from 12 to 8.DeSantis seems contrived with Tucker Carlson, weak against Robert Iger, robotic against Trump and inept with potential donors and endorsers. The 76-year-old Trump and the 44-year-old DeSantis can both be nasty, but Trump’s base finds him entertaining, with his “DeSanctimonious” and “DeSanctus” nicknames for the rival he deems “dull.”Trump is so eager to trash DeSantis that he jumped in on the side of woke Disney and later posted an MSNBC headline on his social media site, “Ron DeSantis’ D.C. charm offensive was a massive failure.”On Friday, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event outside D.C., DeSantis took a shot at Trump, saying he could send Florida workers to finish Trump’s wall.But as Axelrod dryly noted, “If they’re going to get into a food fight, Trump always comes with more food.”Trump 2024 put out a slashing attack on DeSantis the same day, describing Florida as tumbling into destruction (even though Trump seems quite happy living there), harkening back to Bush père’s vicious attacks on Massachusetts when he ran against Michael Dukakis.The bitchy Trump has plenty of ammunition when DeSantis wears white boots redolent of Nancy Sinatra, as Jimmy Kimmel said, to tour Southwest Florida after a hurricane; or when a report alleges (denied by the governor) that DeSantis ate chocolate pudding with his fingers. (Trump backers already have an ad up about that beauty.) DeSantis let Fort Lauderdale go underwater, inundated by flash floods, while he gallivanted around testing the waters.The word “likable” became a flashpoint for Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, with some women supporters claiming it was sexist to talk about that with women candidates.But as Jerry Brown once told me: “I think we’re always judged on likability and I think that’s something a lot of politicians don’t want to admit. But I can tell you, when they throw you out, most times they didn’t like you. They got tired of you.”Ken Langone, a Republican megadonor who gave $200 million to the N.Y.U. medical center, told The Washington Post that he was concerned about DeSantis’s rigid manner and his strict abortion ban. Former Representative David Trott, a Michigan Republican, told Politico’s Playbook that in the two years he sat next to DeSantis on the Foreign Affairs Committee, “he never said a single word to me,” even hello. “If you’re going to go into politics, kind of a fundamental skill that you should have is likability,” Trott said, adding, “He’s just a very arrogant guy, very focused on Ron DeSantis.”Representative Greg Steube of Florida also told Playbook that the governor had never reached out to him — or replied to his efforts to get in touch — even when he was in the hospital after falling 25 feet off a ladder in January. Trump was the first to call him, he said. Trump has also wined and dined Florida lawmakers at Mar-a-Lago.On Monday, Steube endorsed Trump (as of Friday, 11 Florida representatives were for Trump and one for DeSantis) and he later tweeted, “Sad to see the Florida House and Senate, two bodies I had the honor to serve in, carrying the water for an unannounced presidential campaign.”DeSantis had declared himself “kind of a hot commodity” to The Times of London. Now the governor is prowling in that uncomfortable place best conjured by Hemingway in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”People are wondering: What is that leopard doing at this altitude?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

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      DeSantis Greets a Friendly Crowd After a Strong Week for Trump

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      Speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation, the Florida governor doubled down on his 2024 pitch, ignoring headlines about worried donors and Republican consolidation behind Donald Trump.After a week in which little seemed to go his way, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida got back into his comfort zone: talking up his lengthy list of policy achievements in front of a receptive conservative audience outside Washington.“We’ve really become the beating heart of the conservative movement in these United States,” Mr. DeSantis said of his state on Friday morning as he addressed the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank celebrating its 50th anniversary. “Florida is the state where our shared ideas and values actually become political reality.”But outside that packed Maryland ballroom — where the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, suggested Republicans were “craving a bold and visionary leader” like the Florida governor — the conservative movement has signaled some hesitation about Mr. DeSantis as he prepares for a likely 2024 presidential bid. Prominent donors have expressed concern, and Florida Republicans in Congress have so far shown little inclination to back him.Underscoring Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenge is his continued avoidance of mentioning former President Donald J. Trump, who is well ahead in polls and has kept up a whirlwind of attacks on his potential rival. Even as Mr. DeSantis spoke, Mr. Trump shared several critical posts about him on Truth Social, the former president’s social media website.Mr. Trump’s posts focused on days of negative headlines challenging Mr. DeSantis’s political acumen and his handling of the fallout from a huge rainstorm in South Florida. The storm, which hit last week, flooded the Fort Lauderdale area and set off a severe gas shortage in the state’s most populous region.Both of Florida’s Republican senators, in implicit swipes at Mr. DeSantis, have complained about the lack of fuel.“They’ve got to get this thing fixed, this is crazy,” Senator Marco Rubio said in a video on Twitter, without naming the governor. Senator Rick Scott wrote that “Florida families shouldn’t have uncertainty about their next tank of gas.”Jeremy Redfern, the governor’s deputy press secretary, defended the way the state had handled the gas shortage.“At the direction of Governor DeSantis, the state emergency response apparatus has been at work since the flooding occurred and continues in full swing, responding to the needs of the localities as they are communicated to us,” he said in an email.At the Heritage event, which was attended by a mix of policy professionals, conservative activists and think-tank donors, the crowd greeted Mr. DeSantis with a standing ovation. Organizers estimated that roughly 1,000 people had shown up to hear him.In his remarks, Mr. DeSantis leaned into his pitch that he would be the most electable Republican in 2024: He won the governor’s office in a tight 2018 race, governed aggressively as a conservative and then earned a landslide re-election that included flipping liberal Miami-Dade County to the Republican column.“We reject the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years,” he said before cycling through conservative highlights of his record, including his decision to reopen Florida’s economy early in the coronavirus pandemic, his handling of Hurricane Ian and his signing of a new law prohibiting abortion in the state after six weeks of pregnancy.Despite his electoral success, Mr. DeSantis has at times faced criticism for lacking a personal touch on the campaign trail. On Friday, he spent a few minutes shaking hands with attendees after his speech, at one point affably helping a woman navigate the camera on her phone for a selfie.Ross Schumann, an attendee from Midland, Texas, who said he worked in the oil and gas industry and who ran for Congress in 2020, managed to get a brief handshake with the governor as his security detail ushered him toward the exit. He said Mr. DeSantis had hit all the right notes in his speech. But Mr. Schumann did not think the time was right for Mr. DeSantis to run for president.“He’s been very strong on getting policy wins, but this primary is Trump’s to lose,” he said.Mr. DeSantis is learning just how tightly the party is wedded to the former president.On Tuesday, he traveled to Washington seeking to court Republican members of Congress. But so far, the effort has resulted in little success. Several representatives, including some from Florida, have instead endorsed Mr. Trump. One of those lawmakers, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, tweeted a photo from a celebratory dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach residence, where the former president hosted members of Florida’s congressional delegation on Thursday night.Other vulnerabilities have emerged as well. Potential rivals for the White House are slamming Mr. DeSantis over his fight with Disney, one of Florida’s economic engines.All of it is having an effect on the race for dollars. A prominent conservative donor, Thomas Peterffy, told The Financial Times last week that he was putting his donations to Mr. DeSantis “on hold,” citing the governor’s far-right stance on social issues.Even little things seem to be going awry. Early Thursday morning, the state mistakenly sent a noisy emergency alert message to cellphones across Florida — waking up startled residents and leading Mr. DeSantis to promise “swift accountability” on Twitter. (The state soon announced that it had terminated its contract with the software firm responsible.)Soon after the governor ended his speech at the Heritage event, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in an email that Mr. DeSantis had “spent more time playing public relations games instead of actually doing the hard work needed to improve the lives of the people he represents.”Still, Mr. DeSantis’s allies have dismissed recent skepticism of his prospects as Beltway hand-wringing that will not matter when voting begins in the early primary states next year.“If you ask an Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Nevada voter if he had a bad week, they won’t see it that way,” said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who is leading Never Back Down, the main super PAC backing the governor’s expected presidential bid.Mr. Cuccinelli, who served in the Trump administration, said conservative voters were responding to Mr. DeSantis’s record as governor and his biography as a veteran, husband and father.“When we tell that story, people get very excited,” he said. “They see the fighter. They see the winner.”Although polls show the governor lagging well behind Mr. Trump, he is often pegged as voters’ second choice — suggesting he could coalesce support should the former president falter. Mr. DeSantis will next seek to elevate his foreign policy credentials on a state trade mission to Japan, South Korea, Israel and Britain that will start Monday.And he retains the backing of the political donor Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas real estate and aerospace mogul. Mr. Bigelow donated $20 million to Never Back Down — roughly two-thirds of its recent fund-raising — according to a person familiar with the super PAC’s activities.“I will give him more money and go without food,” Mr. Bigelow told Time magazine.While the Heritage event focused on the conservative policies that the group hopes the next Republican administration will embrace — the think tank is working to build a database that could help staff the next G.O.P.-led White House and federal agencies — it also demonstrated how conspiracy theories continue to course through parts of the party’s base.Before Mr. DeSantis arrived, an audience member raised a question during a panel discussion on the Justice Department, falsely telling the speakers that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an inside job.The panel’s moderator, the conservative writer Mollie Hemingway, interrupted to ask for the next question. More

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      DeSantis Is Letting Trump Humiliate Him

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      Watching the nascent Republican primary race, I have a sickening sense of déjà vu. As much as I abhor Donald Trump’s opponents, I’m desperate for one of them to prevail. Trump might be easier for Joe Biden to beat, but anyone who gets the Republican nomination has a chance of being elected, and the possibility of another Trump term is intolerable. So it’s harrowing to see Trump abetted, again, by the cowardice of his opponents.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was supposed to stop Donald Trump, is deflating before even entering the race, with his poll numbers softening and donors fretting. Trump, meanwhile, seems more buoyed than hindered by his ever-proliferating scandals, and is racking up endorsements at DeSantis’s expense. There are several explanations for why this is happening, including the backlash to Trump’s indictment, DeSantis’s near total lack of charisma, and concern among Republican elites about the sweeping abortion ban he just signed. But there’s another dynamic at work here, and I think it’s the big one: Like Trump’s 2016 rivals, DeSantis is making the mistake of believing that the primary race is about issues, while Trump instinctively understands that it’s about dominance.Dueling super PAC attack ads about Social Security and Medicare illustrate DeSantis’s problem. The ad from the Trump camp is inspired by reporting about DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers on an airplane. Over a nauseating video of a man messily consuming chocolate pudding with his hands, the spot says, “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements.” But the policy argument is just an excuse for the disgusting visuals; the point is not to disagree with DeSantis, but to humiliate him.The ad from DeSantis’s allies misses this point entirely. It attempts to fact-check the claims in the pro-Trump spot with video of DeSantis promising to protect Social Security, then tries to turn the tables by airing a clip of Trump saying that “at some point” he’ll “take a look” at entitlements. “Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Governor DeSantis,” the ad continues — whining about Trump’s aggression rather than countering it.This approach didn’t work in 2016 and it’s not working now. Witness the parade of Florida Republicans turning their back on DeSantis and bending the knee to Trump with their endorsements.Republican attempts to outflank Trump from the right, a strategy tried by Ted Cruz in 2016, are also falling flat again. Before Mike Pence’s speech to the National Rifle Association last week, Politico reported that the former vice president was aiming “to get to the right of Donald Trump on guns, bringing debates the two once had behind closed doors in the White House into the public eye.” Pence ended up getting booed by the crowd and then mocked by his former boss.The upcoming Republican primary race, like the last one, is going to be fought on a limbic level, not an ideological one. It will be about who is weak and who is strong. That’s why, if Republicans want a non-Trump candidate in 2024, they’re going to have to find someone willing to tear him down. I understand that this is made difficult by the fact that Republican primary voters often seem excited by Trump’s most repulsive qualities, including his authoritarianism, rapacious greed, incitements to violence, friendly relations with white supremacists and antisemites, and the corruption that’s already led to multiple felony charges. It’s also hard to tar Trump as a loser when so much of the right-wing base believes the fantasy that in 2020 he actually won.Nevertheless, it’s worth thinking about how Trump would take on a candidate like Trump. I don’t think he’d do it with passive-aggressive sniping, like when DeSantis, while attacking the New York district attorney Alvin Bragg for indicting Trump, worked in a dig about the ex-president paying “hush money to a porn star.” Trump, faced with an opponent who had Trump’s own flaws, would just blast away at them all until he found something that stuck.Trump’s approach to DeSantis’s war on Disney is instructive. Until approximately five minutes ago, DeSantis’s willingness to do battle with ostensibly “woke” corporations — even a giant of Florida tourism like Disney — was part of his appeal. But Trump didn’t try to show that he’d be even harder on Disney than DeSantis has been. Instead, he trolled DeSantis by taking Disney’s side, taunting the governor for getting “destroyed” by Disney and speculating that the company would stop investing in Florida. There is, so far, little sign that this is hurting Trump, even though the right has spent months demonizing Disney, a company Tucker Carlson compared to a “sex offender.” Consistent displays of dominance matter more to Republicans than consistent displays of principle.This doesn’t mean that Republican candidates should try to copy Trump’s insult comic act; they’ll almost certainly fail if they do. But they need to be, to use a Trumpish word, tough. As House speaker, Nancy Pelosi managed to repeatedly emasculate Trump not because she imitated him, but because she treated him like a petulant child. Most of Trump’s would-be Republican rivals, on the other hand, are treating him like an unstable father, fantasizing about supplanting him even as they cower in fear of his wrath.An exception is the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who understands that you can’t beat Trump without fighting him. “I don’t believe that Republican voters penalize people who criticize Trump,” he told Politico, adding, “If you think you’re a better person to be president than Donald Trump, then you better make that case.” Whether Christie can make it is hard to say, given that he’s already abased himself before Trump more than once. But he’s right that no one’s going to defeat Trump until they stop acting scared of him.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

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      Anti-Abortion Group Urges Trump to Endorse a National Ban

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      Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, seeking a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, threatened to campaign against any candidate who does not support the proposal.Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion political group, threatened on Thursday to campaign against Donald J. Trump unless he endorsed a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a bold challenge that exposed the rift between the former president and some of his onetime allies.The group’s statement was a line in the sand for all conservative 2024 hopefuls. “We will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America.Mr. Trump has been unwilling to wade into abortion battles after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year and ended federal protections, thanks largely to a majority of conservative justices he helped muscle through as president. Last year, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation for a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks, an idea that split Republicans.Democrats campaigned on abortion rights in the 2022 midterms, and Republicans had another disappointing cycle. Mr. Trump blamed anti-abortion activists for Republican losses, saying they “could have fought much harder.” Others have attributed the party’s disappointing showing to Mr. Trump’s insistence on making election fraud a top issue for candidates.Ms. Dannenfelser’s statement on Thursday was a response to a Washington Post article about the abortion issue in which Mr. Trump’s campaign did not directly address whether he supported an abortion ban after six weeks of pregnancy, which was the limit that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is preparing his own Republican presidential bid, recently signed into law in the state.Instead, Mr. Trump’s campaign issued a statement saying abortion “is an issue that should be decided at the state level.”Mr. Trump was mostly muted about the ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade when it happened. In an interview with The New York Times last year, Mr. Trump downplayed his central role in paving the way for the decision’s reversal.“I never like to take credit for anything,” said Mr. Trump, whose name is affixed to most of his businesses and properties.In a statement, Mr. Trump’s campaign said he was “the most pro-life president in American history, as pro-life leaders have stated emphatically on repeated occasions.”It added: “Even though much work remains to be done to defend the cause of life, President Trump believes it is in the states where the greatest advances can now take place to protect the unborn.”In her statement, Ms. Dannenfelser said “President Trump’s assertion that the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion solely to the states is a completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision and is a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.”A Gallup survey last year found that the share of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” had jumped to 55 percent after hovering between 45 percent and 50 percent for a decade. That sentiment was “the highest Gallup has measured since 1995,” while the 39 percent who identified as “pro-life” was “the lowest since 1996,” the polling firm said. More