DeSantis, Ron

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      Trump and DeSantis Could Both Lose

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      There are two different narratives running through the Republican Party right now. The first is the Trumpian populist narrative we’re all familiar with: American carnage … the elites have betrayed us … the left is destroying us … I am your retribution.On the other hand, Republican governors from places like Georgia, Virginia and New Hampshire often have a different story to tell. They are running growing, prospering states. (Seven of the 10 fastest growing states have Republican governors while eight of the 10 fastest shrinking states have Democratic governors.)So their stories are not about the left behind; they can tell stories about the places people are leaving for. Their most appealing narrative is: Jobs and people are coming to us, we’ve got the better model, we’re providing businesslike leadership to keep it going.These different narratives yield different political messages. The bellicose populists put culture war issues front and center. The conservative governors certainly play the values card, especially when schools try to usurp the role of parents, but they are strongest when emphasizing pocketbook issues and quality of life issues.Gov. Brian Kemp, for example, is making Georgia a hub for green manufacturing, attracting immense investments in electric vehicle technologies. In his inaugural address he vowed to make Georgia “the electric mobility capital of America.” As Alexander Burns noted in Politico, Kemp doesn’t sell this as climate change activism; it’s jobs and prosperity.The two narratives also produce radically different emotional vibes. The Donald Trump/Tucker Carlson orbit is rife with indignation and fury. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin and the previous Arizona governor, Doug Ducey, are warm, upbeat people who actually enjoy their fellow human beings.The former resemble the combative populism of Huey Long; the latter are more likely to reflect the optimism of F.D.R.If American politics worked as it should, then the Republican primaries would be contests between these two different narratives and governing styles — between populism and conservatism.But that’s not happening so far. The first reason is that Trump’s supporters are so many and so loyal, and his political style is so brutal, he may be deterring governors from entering the campaign. My educated guess is that Youngkin will not run for president in 2024; he wants to focus on Virginia. And Kemp may not, either. Kemp has taken on Trump in the past, but who wants to get into a gutter brawl with a front-runner when you already have a fantastic job governing the state you love? It could be that the G.O.P. presidential field will be much smaller than many of us thought a couple of months ago.The second reason we’re not seeing the two narratives face off is Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor should be the ultimate optimistic, businesslike conservative. His state is growing faster than any other in the country. But instead, he’s running as a dour, humorless culture war populist — presumably because that’s what he is.So right now the G.O.P. has two leading candidates with similar views, and the same ever-present anti-woke combativeness. The race is between populist Tweedledum and populist Tweedledee.The conventional wisdom is that it will stay that way — but maybe not. At this point in earlier election cycles, Jeb Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee were doing well in their polls. None became the nominee.Furthermore, the conservative managerial wing of the party is not some small offshoot of the Tucker Carlson universe. In 2022, the normies did much better than the populists. Look at Gov. Mike DeWine’s landslide win in Ohio. Millions and millions of Republicans are voting for these people.In Georgia Kemp took on Trump about the Big Lie and cruised to victory. As Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report has pointed out, Kemp had almost 90 percent approval among his state’s Republican voters in a January poll, whereas Trump’s favorability rating was nearly 20 points lower among those voters. Kemp’s overall approval rating among Georgia voters was a whopping 62 percent, including 34 percent of Democrats. Trump’s favorability rating was a pathetic 38 percent in this swing state.The Republican donor class is mobilizing to try to prevent a Trump nomination, and DeSantis is overpriced.Do we really think a guy with a small, insular circle of advisers and limited personal skills is going to do well in the intimate contests in Iowa and New Hampshire? As voters focus on the economy, DeSantis massively erred in playing culture war issues so hard.The conclusion I draw is that the Trump-DeSantis duopoly is unstable and represents a wing of the party many people are getting sick of.What does that mean? Maybe somebody like Kemp is coaxed into running. Maybe eyes turn to Tim Scott, an effective, optimistic senator from South Carolina. Maybe the former governor of New Jersey Chris Christie enters the race and takes a sledgehammer to Trump in a way that doesn’t help his own candidacy but shakes up the status quo.The elemental truth is that the Republican Party is like a baseball team that has tremendous talent in the minor leagues and a star pitcher who can’t throw strikes or do his job. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a change.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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      Pro-Trump Super PAC Files an Ethics Complaint Against DeSantis

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      The group, the MAGA Inc. super PAC, accused Gov. Ron DeSantis of violating Florida laws by operating a shadow presidential campaign. A DeSantis spokeswoman called it a politically motivated attack.Donald J. Trump spent much of the past year teasing a presidential campaign, telling New York magazine last summer that he had “already made that decision” on whether to run and promising his rally crowds for months that they would be “very happy” about his choice.Now, Mr. Trump’s allies are accusing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida of doing the same — but insisting that he has violated state law.MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, filed a complaint with Florida officials on Wednesday, alleging that Mr. DeSantis — the former president’s chief potential rival for the Republican Party’s 2024 nomination — is operating a shadow presidential campaign.The super PAC said that Mr. DeSantis should be considered a presidential candidate because he has taken meetings with donors, raised money for a political committee and toured the country to sell books, while allies are reaching out to potential campaign aides.“Governor DeSantis’s failure to declare his candidacy is no mere oversight,” reads the MAGA Inc. complaint to the Florida Commission on Ethics. “It is a coordinated effort specifically designed for him to accept, as unethical gifts, illegal campaign contributions and certain personal benefits.”The pro-Trump super PAC, which sent the complaint via certified mail on Wednesday, is asking the state commission to impose “the most severe penalties” under Florida ethics law, which include, among other things, impeachment, removal from office, public censure and ballot disqualification. NBC News earlier reported on the complaint on Wednesday.A spokeswoman in the governor’s office, Taryn Fenske, said the complaint was part of a “list of frivolous and politically motivated attacks,” adding, “It’s inappropriate to use state ethics complaints for partisan purposes.”While Mr. DeSantis hasn’t formally declared a White House bid, he is checking all the boxes of a potential candidate. He published a book that could double as the outline of a 2024 campaign platform and has been promoting the book on a nationwide tour — including stops in states that are hosting the first three Republican primary contests. He has also laid out foreign policy positions this week on Fox News.The allegations from the pro-Trump group echo a similar complaint filed against Mr. Trump last year in March by a Democratic super PAC. In that complaint, the Democratic group, American Bridge, argued to the Federal Election Commission that Mr. Trump had been behaving like a 2024 presidential candidate while avoiding federal oversight by not filing a statement of candidacy.The group filed a lawsuit in July against the federal commission, seeking to force it to take action against Mr. Trump within 30 days. The lawsuit accused Mr. Trump of trying to disguise his run for the presidency in order to leave voters “in the dark about the contributions and expenditures he has received, which is information they are entitled to.”The F.E.C. did not take action against Mr. Trump. He eventually announced a formal presidential campaign four months later.Mr. Trump’s allies could face a similarly tough road in persuading the state ethics commission to act. Mr. DeSantis has appointed five of the nine members of the commission.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis were once political allies, but have grown increasingly antagonistic toward each other.Mr. DeSantis, who has branded himself as one of his party’s most ruthless political brawlers, has so far declined to directly confront Mr. Trump. Instead, he has made thinly veiled contrasts with Mr. Trump, telling crowds that his administration in Tallahassee has been free of leaks and chaos — such as the kind that often plagued the Trump White House — and excoriating the leadership of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, one of Mr. Trump’s key public health advisers during the Covid-19 pandemic.Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has grown increasingly aggressive in his attacks on Mr. DeSantis.At an event in Davenport, Iowa, on Monday, Mr. Trump drew a mix of applause and groans from the crowd as he attacked Mr. DeSantis over attempts to cut ethanol production and said the Florida governor wanted to “decimate” Social Security and Medicare by supporting proposals that would have increased the age to receive benefits.Mr. Trump scheduled his event three days after Mr. DeSantis made his first introduction to Iowa voters in the same Mississippi River town. More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Ukraine Stance Angers G.O.P. Hawks

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      The Florida governor, who joined Donald Trump in declaring that defending Ukraine from Russia was not a vital interest, drew swift condemnations from establishment Republicans.Declaring this week that defending Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was not a vital interest for the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida cemented a Republican shift away from hawkish foreign policy that has played out over the past decade and accelerated with Donald J. Trump’s political rise.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis — whose combined support makes up more than 75 percent of Republican primary voters in the nascent 2024 presidential contest — are now largely aligned on Ukraine, signaling a sharp break from the interventionist approach that drove former President George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.Republican foreign policy hawks recoiled at Mr. DeSantis’s statement on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News on Monday night, in which the governor deviated from the position held by most of the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader. Mr. McConnell and other top congressional Republicans have framed the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.“DeSantis is wrong and seems to have forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan,” said former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who led the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.“This is not ‘a territorial dispute,’” she said in a statement, echoing Mr. DeSantis’s phrasing. “The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom. Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”She went on: “Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon. Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.”Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday morning that he “could not disagree more” with Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the stakes attached to the defense of Ukraine.“The Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well,” said Mr. Graham, comparing Mr. DeSantis to the British prime minister who appeased Adolf Hitler. “This is an attempt by Putin to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also took issue with Mr. DeSantis’s comments — a significant rebuke from the senior Republican in Mr. DeSantis’s home state.“I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is,” Mr. Rubio, a former presidential candidate, told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.And Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico he was “disturbed” by Mr. DeSantis’s comments.Mr. Trump has long made his views on foreign intervention clear, railing against the Iraq war in his 2016 campaign, but Mr. DeSantis had sought to avoid being pinned down on one of the most important foreign policy questions facing the prospective Republican presidential field.His choice of words, describing the conflict as a “territorial dispute,” was telling. By referring to Russia’s unprovoked invasion that way, he dismissed the argument that Mr. Putin’s aggression threatened the postwar international order. Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump have unequivocally rejected the idea that the conflict is a war to defend “freedom,” a position espoused by two of their potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador.Mr. DeSantis left himself some wiggle room in his statement, which came in response to a questionnaire that Mr. Carlson had sent to all of the major prospective Republican presidential candidates. The governor did not promise to end all U.S. aid to Ukraine — an omission noticed by some hard-line opponents of support for Ukraine, who criticized Mr. DeSantis for leaving open the possibility that he would keep up the flow of American assistance.Leading congressional Republicans have framed the Russian invasion as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesYet by downplaying the stakes of the conflict to the extent he did, Mr. DeSantis angered many Republicans in the foreign policy establishment who said he had talked himself into a corner. Even if he were to change his mind about Ukraine, how would a President DeSantis rally the public and Congress to send billions of dollars and high-tech weapons for a mere “territorial dispute” of no vital interest to America?Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, said that the remarks were “a naïve and complete misunderstanding of the historical context of what’s going on,” and that authoritarians would fill the void if the U.S. retreated from global leadership.Charles Kupperman, who served under John R. Bolton as a deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, said Mr. DeSantis had shown “a very poor understanding of our national security interests,” adding, “I’m surprised he’s gone so far so fast.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.It was unclear who, if anyone, helped Mr. DeSantis write the statement.Ms. Haley, one of the three major Republicans who have announced a 2024 campaign, released her response to Mr. Carlson on Tuesday, offering an unequivocal “yes” to the question of whether stopping Russia was of vital interest to the U.S.“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory, including avoiding a wider war,” she said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”“History has shown us that telling the enemy what you won’t do leads to more aggression, not less,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday. Julia Nikhinson for The New York TimesConservatives who want the United States to shift its focus away from Europe to focus on combating China were delighted by Mr. DeSantis’s statement.“Americans desperately need a foreign policy that understands what’s really in their interests and pursues those interests strategically and realistically in a dangerous world,” said Elbridge Colby, a former senior official at the Defense Department who recently briefed Senate Republicans on China policy.“That’s clearly the approach Governor DeSantis laid out in his response to Tucker Carlson,” Mr. Colby added. “He prioritized the top threats to America, such as China and narcotics streaming over the border, rightly seeing Ukraine as a distraction from these top challenges, while also rejecting the Wilsonian radicalism that has led us to disaster before and would be catastrophic if pursued today.”And there is a sharp divide between elite Republican opinion and the views of party voters. While many top Republicans were outraged by Mr. DeSantis’s statement, he and Mr. Trump stand closer to the average G.O.P. voter than Republicans like Mr. McConnell who are urging Mr. Biden to do more to support Ukraine.A January poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters thought the U.S. was giving too much support to Ukraine. Only 17 percent thought the U.S. was not doing enough.Conservative interventionists had held out hope that Mr. DeSantis would split with Mr. Trump on Ukraine policy. Mr. DeSantis spooked them late last month when he suggested on Fox News that he was not committed to defending Ukraine.But Mr. DeSantis’s comments in that interview were brief and vague enough for these conservatives to stay hopeful that he would end up on their side. They searched for positive signs, finding solace in Mr. DeSantis’s record in Congress. In 2014 and 2015, after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis criticized President Barack Obama as not doing enough to support Ukraine. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis recently hosted the historian William Inboden, the author of a recent book about President Ronald Reagan’s efforts during the Cold War, to exchange thoughts about foreign policy, according to two people familiar with the meeting.Dr. Inboden and an associate did not respond to emails seeking comment. An aide to Mr. DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.Several hawks went into overdrive as they tried to lobby Mr. DeSantis. Kimberley A. Strassel, the Wall Street Journal columnist, urged him not to join what she called Mr. Trump’s “G.O.P. surrender caucus.”“The governor has an opportunity to contrast a bold, well-thought-out foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s opaque retreatism,” Ms. Strassel wrote.But pro-Ukraine Republicans who had observed Mr. DeSantis closely had more reasons to be alarmed. They were unsettled by his ties to the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank that promotes foreign policy views broadly aligned with Mr. Trump’s. On Monday night, only the most optimistic interventionists could have still been hopeful that Mr. DeSantis would end up on their side. More

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      M.I.A. in 2024: The Republicans Trump Vanquished in 2016

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      If Donald J. Trump were not running for president in 2024, there’s a group of Republicans who could be expected to vie for the White House: the ones Mr. Trump beat in 2016.Instead, many of these once high-wattage candidates are either skipping the 2024 cycle or have bowed out of national politics altogether. Jeb Bush is mostly a political recluse. Three senators, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, all capitulated to Mr. Trump and became sometimes unconvincing acolytes. After losing re-election for governor in Wisconsin, Scott Walker now runs an organization for young conservatives and hosts a podcast.None have shown much interest in facing the wrath of Mr. Trump again.For all of the chatter about how the former president has grown weak politically and is ripe for overthrowing as the Republican Party’s dominant figure, and for all the polling that shows large numbers of Republican voters would prefer that Mr. Trump not run again, the will to challenge him is small, and the few contenders brave enough so far are inexperienced on the national stage.That has left Mr. Trump as potentially the only Republican candidate in 2024 who has run for president before. The last time an open Republican presidential primary featured just one candidate who had previously sought the office was in 1980.The relatively small size of the prospective 2024 field of Trump challengers, with several potential candidates dragging their feet on entering the race, may have something to do with the debasing experience of the Republicans who battled him in 2016 and came away with nothing to show for it but insulting sobriquets like Low-Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted and Liddle Marco.Mr. Trump still commands the loyalty of about a quarter of Republicans, who say they would vote for him even as an independent candidate.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“I was just wise enough to see it before everybody else, so I didn’t get a nickname,” Mr. Walker said in an interview of his 2016 campaign, which he ended after 71 days with a warning to consolidate behind one candidate or risk nominating Mr. Trump. “I could see the phenomenon that was Donald Trump going into the 2016 election. And it just took others longer to figure that out.”Several of the other Republicans who lost in 2016 have made clear that they have absolutely no intention of confronting Mr. Trump again.“I will always do what God wants me to do, but I hope that’s not it,” said Ben Carson, the pioneering neurosurgeon who became Mr. Trump’s housing secretary after his primary loss. “It’s not something I particularly want.” Mr. Carson went so far as to say he never wanted to run for president in the first place. “I didn’t particularly want to do it then,” he said. “There were so many pushing me to do it. I said, ‘If people really want me to, I will,’ but it was never anything that I wanted to do. I certainly don’t want to do it now.”Mr. Cruz, who has said repeatedly that he is running for re-election to the Senate and not for president, predicted last fall that if Mr. Trump chose to bow out, “everybody runs.” And Mr. Walker, in his interview, said he still harbored presidential ambitions — but not right now.“I’m a quarter-century younger than Joe Biden, so I’ve got plenty of time,” Mr. Walker, 55, said. “But not in ’24.”Running for president, Mr. Carson said, “was never anything that I wanted to do. I certainly don’t want to do it now.”Lexey Swall for The New York TimesEven as the G.O.P. salivates to take on President Biden, many ambitious Republicans sense that it may be wise to wait for Mr. Trump to depart the national scene. This apparent reluctance to join the 2024 field — which early polling suggests will be dominated by Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — shows that high-level Republicans still view the former president as a grave threat to their political futures, and see more long-term costs than benefits in challenging him.Mr. DeSantis, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and several other Republicans are angling to topple Mr. Trump, but the expected field will probably fit easily on one debate stage.Already, personal ambitions are colliding with a desire to avoid fracturing the opposition to Mr. Trump. Warning of “another multicar pileup,” former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland announced this month that he would not run for president. And Paul D. Ryan, the former House speaker, recently reiterated his call for a narrow primary field.The don’t-run stance upends decades of political wisdom. Even long-shot presidential bids have provided a path to national relevance and laid the groundwork for subsequent campaigns — or at least cable TV shows. Before Mr. Trump won in 2016, seven of the previous eight Republican presidential nominees had either run for president before or been president — and the other was the son of a president. Mr. Biden won the office on his third try.Mr. Cruz has said repeatedly that he is running for re-election to the Senate and not for president.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesNearly all of the Democrats who ran and lost to Mr. Biden in 2020 ended their campaigns in better political shape than they began them, either with larger national and fund-raising profiles or with consolation prizes that included the vice presidency, a cabinet post, a key Senate seat, Senate committee chairs, influence on the Biden administration and a major platform as a right-wing pundit..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.But Republicans eyeing 2024 appear to see less to gain. They are well aware of Mr. Trump’s cutthroat political approach and his impulse to tear down in personal terms anyone he sees as a threat — even if those traits helped win him the undying loyalty of many Republican voters and created a cult of personality that has at times consumed his party.Though his political strength has ebbed, he still commands the loyalty of about a quarter of the party’s voters, who say they would vote for him even as an independent candidate.For the 2016 Republican field, losing to Mr. Trump was a springboard to party obsolescence.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina became one of Mr. Trump’s most fawning supporters and has endorsed his 2024 campaign. Mr. Rubio, still a Florida senator, is now the fourth most influential Republican in his own state. Former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Carly Fiorina, the former corporate executive whose signature campaign moment came in response to Mr. Trump’s denigrating her appearance, emerged in 2020 as surrogates for the Biden campaign in its effort to court moderate Republicans repelled by Mr. Trump.George Pataki, the former three-term governor of New York, acknowledged in an interview that by the time he ran in 2016, he was past his own viability.“Politics is about timing, and I should have run before the time I did,” Mr. Pataki said. He explained that he had never considered a 2024 campaign and that most people could plainly see the race was shaping up as a Trump-DeSantis contest.Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has been a confidant, competitor and critic of Mr. Trump, is now one of the few prospective 2024 candidates willing to publicly disparage the former president by name. (Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who is toying with running, has morphed into a dial-a-quote for Trump criticism.)In a recent interview, Mr. Christie said presidential campaigns exposed politicians, like Mr. DeSantis, whose experience in the spotlight was limited to smaller press corps in secondary media markets.“We’ve seen plenty of people just go, whoosh, all the air comes out of the balloon, because they get on that stage and either they’re not smart enough or they’re not skilled enough or experienced enough,” he said.Mr. Christie is the only other 2016 candidate who has said he is even considering running again in 2024, though an aide to Mr. Rubio said he had not formally ruled it out. Neither man has taken any concrete steps toward building a campaign.No one else other than Mr. Trump in the current or prospective field of 2024 candidates has run for president before. That is unlike 2016, when the field included Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, the two previous winners of the Iowa caucuses, and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor whose 2012 effort flamed out after he forgot a key part of his signature campaign pledge on a debate stage.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is thought to be Mr. Trump’s chief rival for the 2024 nomination.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesFor months, Mr. DeSantis has been the lone Republican who is competitive with Mr. Trump in polls. He has drawn public praise from a flotilla of prominent Republicans eager to move on from Mr. Trump but conscious of how he has transformed the party.Mr. Bush, a fellow Floridian who as the early front-runner in 2016 drew the harshest attacks from Mr. Trump, emerged last month to heap praise on Mr. DeSantis.“He’s been a really effective governor,” Mr. Bush said in a Fox Nation interview. “He’s young. I think we’re on the verge of a generational change in our politics. I kind of hope so.”Mr. Bush did not respond to emails for this article.As Mr. Bush showed, early strength in a presidential primary can be perilous, especially for untested candidates. Bad first impressions in front of a national audience can doom a campaign and sully a career.Mr. Christie said the platform he built for himself as governor and in 2016 would allow him to enter the 2024 race late if he chose. He has repeatedly said that Republican voters are tired of Mr. Trump and suggested that there could still be room for a battle-tested late entrant.“I’ve never seen in my adult life the person who everybody thought was going to be the guy be the guy,” Mr. Christie said. “Conventional wisdom was Jeb Bush was going to be the nominee. He raised $150 million and he was going to win, OK? He got one delegate, I think.”Mr. Bush in fact took four delegates from Iowa and New Hampshire before dropping out of the race after placing fourth in South Carolina. More

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      Ron DeSantis Says Protecting Ukraine Is Not a Key U.S. Interest

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      The Florida governor, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, broke with Republicans to attack President Biden’s foreign policy and align more closely with Donald Trump as he weighs a presidential bid.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has sharply broken with Republicans who are determined to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, saying in a statement made public on Monday night that protecting the European nation’s borders is not a vital U.S. interest and that policymakers should instead focus attention at home.The statement from Mr. DeSantis, who is seen as an all but declared presidential candidate for the 2024 campaign, puts him in line with the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, former President Donald J. Trump.The venue Mr. DeSantis chose for his statement on a major foreign policy question revealed almost as much as the substance of the statement itself. The statement was broadcast on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on Fox News. It was in response to a questionnaire that the host, Mr. Carlson, sent last week to all major prospective Republican presidential candidates, and is tantamount to an acknowledgment by Mr. DeSantis that a candidacy is in the offing.On Mr. Carlson’s show, Mr. DeSantis separated himself from Republicans who say the problem with Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy is that he’s not doing enough. Mr. DeSantis made clear he thinks Mr. Biden is doing too much, without a clearly defined objective, and taking actions that risk provoking war between the U.S. and Russia.Mr. Carlson is one of the most ardent opponents of U.S. involvement in Ukraine. He has called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine a corrupt “antihero” and mocked him for dressing “like the manager of a strip club.”“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” Mr. DeSantis said in a statement that Mr. Carlson read aloud on his show.Mr. DeSantis’s views on Ukraine policy now align with Mr. Trump’s. The former president also answered Mr. Carlson’s questionnaire.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 7The race begins. More

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      Trump Visits the Same Iowa City on Monday That DeSantis Visited on Friday

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      Donald J. Trump’s event on Monday evening in Davenport was aimed in part at slowing any momentum from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.DAVENPORT, Iowa — Ron DeSantis may be a rising star among Republicans, but the way Donald J. Trump’s arrival brought downtown Davenport to a halt on Monday suggested the former president remains, at least for now, the center of the party’s galaxy.Residents of the Mississippi River city had one of the first opportunities in the country for a side-by-side comparison between the two Republicans leading the party’s early presidential primary polls, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida.Three days after Mr. DeSantis drew a strong crowd of 1,000 people for a speech on an icy Friday morning, Mr. Trump’s arrival shut down traffic by 2 p.m. Monday afternoon. The enthusiastic Trump crowd, wrapped in Trump flags and dressed in bootleg pro-Trump shirts — “Jesus, Trump & Freedom,” read one — started lining up at 7 a.m. for an event 11 hours later at the 2,400-seat, standing-room-only Adler Theater.The dichotomy showed the wide gap between the two politicians at this embryonic stage of the 2024 presidential race. The Republican front-runner is a 76-year-old politician seeking the White House for the third consecutive time after a lifetime in the public eye. His chief potential rival is a 44-year-old governor whose book tour event last week was his first visit to Iowa as he decides whether to run for the White House.But while Mr. Trump has solidified his standing in national polls in recent weeks, he returned to Iowa with both prosecutors and political competitors on his heels.In Manhattan, the district attorney’s office has signaled that the former president is likely to face criminal charges over his role in the payment of hush money to a porn star. On Monday, just hours before Mr. Trump took the stage in Iowa, Michael Cohen, his former fixer, testified in front of a grand jury as a crucial witness for prosecutors who appear to be nearing an indictment of the former president.And he is facing new political vulnerabilities after the 2022 midterms became the third consecutive election cycle to end in disappointment for Republicans.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 7The race begins. More

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      2024 Republicans Converge on Iowa

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      Jordan Gale for The New York TimesGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is expected to run, made appearances in Davenport and Des Moines on Friday.Former President Donald J. Trump will be in Davenport on Monday.Nikki Haley, a former governor, has been campaigning in Iowa since Wednesday, with stops in Council Bluffs and Clive. More

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      Trump Knows How to Make Promises. Do His Rivals?

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      To understand the resilience of Donald Trump’s influence in the Republican Party, the way he always seems to revive despite scandal, debacle or disgrace, look no further than the contrast between his early policy forays in the 2024 campaign and what two of his prospective challengers are doing.Judging by Trump’s address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, his policy agenda so far includes two crucial planks: first, a pledge to defend Social Security and Medicare against deficit hawks in either party, and second, a retrofuturist vision of baby bonuses‌ and new “freedom cities” rising in the American hinterland, with building projects following classical rather than ugly modern-architecture lines.Meanwhile, two of his challengers, the definitely running Nikki Haley and the hoping-to-run Mike Pence, have made headlines this year for floating entitlement cuts: Haley for her proposal this week to change the retirement age for today’s twentysomethings, Pence for bringing back the idea of private Social Security accounts, of the kind that George W. Bush proposed in 2005.Trump’s insouciance about the cost of entitlements is irresponsible, needless to say, and after four years of experience with his leadership we can imagine what the freedom city policy would yield — a Trump casino and some mixed-used buildings run by Jared Kushner rising off an unfinished spur of highway somewhere in the vacant portions of the American West, funded by hard-sell fund-raising appeals to vulnerable seniors. And of course in the CPAC speech Trumpian policy was a minor theme amid the dominant motifs of rambling self-pity and threats of retribution.But one can acknowledge all that and still see that once again he’s offering G.O.P. primary voters an alternative to the pinched style, stale ideas and phony fiscal seriousness of the pre-Trump — and now, it would seem, post-Trump — Republican Party.A real fiscal seriousness would be defensible with inflation running hot. But Haley’s idea of cutting benefits for Americans retiring in 2065 is largely irrelevant to those immediate considerations. Pence’s revival of the private account proposal, meanwhile, is hopelessly out of touch with both fiscal and political reality. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru notes, the Bush-era private accounts plan depended on using surplus funds to smooth the transition, but now that the boomers are into retirement, the window for that kind of maneuver has been closed.Mike PenceAnna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesNikki HaleyScott Olson/Getty ImagesSo if Trump is being irresponsible and implausible in order to pander to his voters, Haley and Pence are doing something weirder and more self-defeating: They’re offering ideas that are implausible and unpopular, whose only virtue is that they sound vaguely serious if you don’t think too hard about the details. “Neither popular nor right” might as well be their motto, one that doubles as the epitaph for the kind of right-wing politics that Trump’s 2016 campaign overthrew.The reality is that there are only two ways to address the ballooning costs of Social Security and Medicare and their crowding-out of other national priorities. One is to negotiate deals that supply bipartisan cover for reform — either working at the margins via the so-called Secret Congress, the out-of-the-headline deal making that’s become more commonplace of late, or seeking the kind of grand bargain that eluded John Boehner and Barack Obama.But no Republican primary candidate these days is going to campaign on making deals, small or large, with Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer, so this kind of scenario is more or less irrelevant to a presidential campaign. The only scenario that could possibly be relevant, for a skillful communicator with some sense of civic duty, would be to frame an entitlement reform as a kind of intergenerational transfer, a rebalancing of accounts in a society too tilted toward old-age spending. To use the example of Trump’s big ideas, such a framing might reassure voters in youth and middle age that they would be receiving slightly lower benefits at retirement so that more things could be done right now, like baby bonuses for young families and cheaper real estate in sparkling new cities.But that’s a hard imaginative leap for a certain kind of Republican politician, trained in the idea that making actual policy promises to persuadable voters is what Democrats and socialists do, and the point of cutting Social Security and Medicare is either fiscal virtue for its own sake or else to free space for the lowest possible upper-bracket tax rate.Whereas whatever one might say about Trump’s follow-through, he has never had any trouble making attractive-seeming promises to voters (or to investors or municipal officials, for that matter).So the question for his would-be rivals, and especially for Ron DeSantis as he waits, watches and prepares, is whether they can learn enough from this style to finally overcome it, or whether they’ll offer so little to voters that Trump’s promises will still sound sweet.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