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      Chris Christie, Glenn Youngkin, Chris Sununu: Who Can Save the G.O.P. in 2024?

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      At this point, it seems a little gratuitous to pick at the scab of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s not-so-dazzling presidential campaign opening. Let us just stipulate that when your long-anticipated announcement jump-starts #DeSaster trending on social media, things could have gone better.The feeble rollout wouldn’t much matter if the Florida governor were otherwise dominating the Republican primary race, or even holding steady. But he isn’t. Slipping poll numbers, questionable policy moves, the people skills of a Roomba — his multiplying red flags have landed the Republican Party in the odd position of having not one but two problematic front-runners: its original MAGA king and the lead runner in its Anyone But Trump lane.So where does the race go from here? Most likely nowhere new, unless someone steps up with a fresh approach to the Trump problem. Because so far, the pack of pretenders to Donald Trump’s throne reeks of weakness. And nothing delights the MAGA king more than curb-stomping the weak.A presidential field without a strong front-runner invariably invites a pile-in of challengers. Every Tim, Nikki and Vivek — and Asa, Doug, Larry, Mike, etc. — surveys the scene and thinks: Heck yeah, why not me? Why not, indeed. Given the topsy-turvy state of the political terrain, is it really much more ridiculous for Vivek Ramaswamy, the upstart tech entrepreneur, to think he has a shot at the nomination than for Mike Pence to? No rampaging MAGA mob has ever brayed for his hanging, so in some regards, he has a critical edge on the former vice president.A host of seasoned politicians, along with characters no one has ever heard of, are out there right now poring over the results of test polls and focus groups, talking with players in Iowa and New Hampshire, huddling with big donors and strategists. Fueling the frenzy, twitchy donors are casting about for a more promising champion than Mr. DeSantis, pressuring their favorite white knights to join the tournament. Listen closely and you can hear the phones chirping in the offices of popular Republican governors such as Chris Sununu, Glenn Youngkin and Brian Kemp.Even as the mass of pretenders to Mr. Trump’s throne grows, the energy from the field remains stubbornly subdued. The pretenders have adopted a stance of nonaggression, an unwillingness to come hard at the MAGA king. The reasoning behind this is no secret. The former president feeds on conflict like a vampire on virgins. But the result is a collection of challengers trying to sell beta-male energy to a voting base hooked on outrage, machismo and blood lust.The whole vibe of the Republican contest feels increasingly passive-aggressive, with the pretenders giving Mr. Trump the side eye as they throw varying degrees of shade. The most direct (like Asa Hutchinson) somberly discuss the former president’s character flaws and lament that his antidemocratic behavior has disqualified himself from high office. Far more often, the candidates lard their electoral pitches with veiled criticisms about how governing is about more than salty tweets or how the presidency isn’t about building a personal brand — all while avoiding Mr. Trump’s name, of course.Even Mr. DeSantis, who fancies himself a fighter, won’t risk a full-frontal assault. His people have said he plans to be strategic with his criticisms — more shiv than sledgehammer. How cool. How strategic. But you know what happens when someone takes a sledgehammer to a shiv, right?If Republicans are serious about dislodging Mr. Trump, this race needs a jolt. Soon. No one knows exactly what might do the trick, but those weary of groveling before him would do well to start experimenting — for the sake of the party more than even their own ambitions. At the very least, someone needs to climb into the ring with the willingness and disposition to throw a direct punch. Metaphorically, of course.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, has been making noises as if he wants to be that guy. In a recent interview with Politico, he vowed that if he runs, he will tackle Mr. Trump’s weaknesses head-on, from the character troubles to the record of losing. (So much losing.) “I don’t believe that Republican voters penalize people who criticize Trump,” he asserted.To pull this off, Mr. Christie would need to go all in on his no-nonsense, in-your-face, Jersey tough-guy shtick — the one where he yells at people to sit down and shut up — and quash the sycophantic streak that had him smooching Mr. Trump’s backside for years. If he could go bully-a-bully with the former president, things could get interesting for the first time in forever. In 2016, no Republicans went hard at Mr. Trump because no one took him seriously. This time, most are too afraid of him. They are still hoping to find some magical way to woo his voters without his noticing or fighting back.Good luck with that.This race needs a brawler in the mix — if not Mr. Christie, then someone else with that inclination.Omar Little, the drug-dealer-robbing philosopher on “The Wire,” once observed, “You come at the king, you best not miss.” But if everyone is too chicken — excuse me, too strategic — to seriously come at the king at all, how can anyone expect a regime 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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      DeSantis Plans Traditional Campaign Stops After Twitter Launch Glitches

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      Mr. DeSantis will make stops next week in the three early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.After his digital kickoff went haywire on Twitter on Wednesday night, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is going analog next week for a more traditional rollout of his presidential campaign.Mr. DeSantis will make stops in the three early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina from May 30 to June 2. The four-day swing through 12 cities and towns is being billed as the first leg of his “Great American Comeback Tour.” Mr. DeSantis will start with his first in-person event of the campaign in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday. He will remain in Iowa on Wednesday, before traveling to New Hampshire on Thursday and South Carolina on Friday.“Our campaign is committed to putting in the time to win these early nominating states,” Generra Peck, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, said in a statement.Campaigning in a presidential primary is, especially early on, usually a grip-and-grin affair. Mr. DeSantis’s decision to declare his candidacy on a livestream Twitter Spaces event with Elon Musk, the platform’s billionaire owner, came with the possibility of spectacular failure — which seemed to take place, at least for the first 25 minutes, when the event was plagued by technical glitches, causing dead air and an intermittently hot mic.Mr. DeSantis’s return to a more traditional form of electioneering will still be closely watched. He has had some awkward moments on the trail so far while meeting voters, leading to mockery from the front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination, former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. DeSantis is expected to need a victory in Iowa and a close second-place finish in New Hampshire, at least, to show that he can challenge Mr. Trump.On Thursday night, Mr. DeSantis is scheduled to attend a reception with major donors at a hotel in Miami. The donors are helping Mr. DeSantis begin his fund-raising efforts. Despite the Twitter mishap, his campaign said it had raised more than $1 million online during its first hour on Wednesday night. More

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      Takeaways From DeSantis’s 2024 Presidential Campaign Announcement

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      Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited entry into the presidential race showed some potential strengths as a Republican candidate, after an embarrassing start on Twitter.Gov. Ron DeSantis’s glitch-marred 2024 debut on Twitter was a distraction from his chance to introduce himself as a serious contender to take down former President Donald J. Trump.It was a much-anticipated moment for the Florida governor to reset after months of dropping in the polls, which made the painfully long 20-plus minutes of Twitter malfunctions on Wednesday all the more disappointing to his supporters.For all the media attention on the Twitter fiasco — The Daily Mail called it a “De-Saster,” Fox News a “disaster,” Breitbart News a “DeBacle” — Mr. DeSantis appeared to have later found his footing on the familiar airwaves of Fox News, a far more traditional — and effective — method of communicating to primary voters. His appearance there was the first time he laid out a substantive case for what a DeSantis presidency would look like.Still, it was a night his team will be eager to put behind them. And it highlighted both Mr. DeSantis’s potential successes as a candidate but also a campaign still in formation while under intense attack from a dominant Republican front-runner.Here are five takeaways.Taking risks on Twitter backfiredThe delay was longer than some campaign speeches.For more than 25 minutes, Twitter wheezed its way through what was supposed to be Mr. DeSantis’s grand pronouncement of his 2024 candidacy, with long stretches of dead air interrupted by frantic, hot-mic whispers before they pulled the plug and started over.The Twitter event with Mr. DeSantis was marred with technical problems.A presidential announcement is the rarest of opportunities. It is the moment when a candidate can draw all the attention on themselves and their vision. Instead, Mr. DeSantis wound up almost as a panelist at his own event, sharing the stage with Elon Musk and his malfunctioning social media site.Fox News splashed a banner headline at one point on its website that featured a photo of Mr. Musk, not Mr. DeSantis. “Want to actually see and hear Ron DeSantis?” read a breaking news alert on the site. “Tune into Fox News.”Even in advance, the decision to begin his campaign on Twitter with Mr. Musk had drawn mixed reviews. It was innovative, yes — and a chance to reach a potentially huge online audience — but also risky.The technically challenged result obscured some of Mr. DeSantis’s arguments and sapped him of listeners, and potential donors. For a candidate whose promise of competence is a Republican selling point, it was a less-than-ideal first impression. Mr. Trump and President Biden both mercilessly mocked the rollout.His aides said Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in an hour, a sizable amount but far from the record for a presidential kickoff, with no details provided about how many individual donors gave small contributions.Mr. Biden’s campaign was also seeking to capitalize, buying Google ads to show Biden donation pages for those searching for terms like “DeSantis disaster” and “DeSantis flop.”The candidate of educated right-wingersThe DeSantis-Musk discussion on Twitter meandered at times into a cul-de-sac of the hyper-online right.Here’s a taste of the highly ideological and wonky message Mr. DeSantis delivered:“Some of the problems with the university and the ideological capture — that didn’t happen by accident, you can trace back all the way to the accreditation cartels. Well, guess what? To become an accreditor, how do you do that? You’ve got to get approved by the U.S. Department of Education. So we’re going to be doing alternative accreditation regimes, where instead of saying, ‘You will only get accredited if you do D.E.I.,’ you’ll have an accreditor that will say, ‘We will not accredit you if you do D.E.I. We want a colorblind, merit-based accreditation scheme.’”Got that?Mr. DeSantis repeatedly highlighted his blue-collar roots. But it has long been apparent that Mr. DeSantis polls far better with college-educated Republicans than he does among those without college degrees, who heavily favor Mr. Trump and form the increasingly rural base of the Republican Party. And his campaign introduction night showed why that’s the case.The conversation detoured into complaints about the horrors of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair magazines and into discussions of cryptocurrencies and the “de-banking” of “politically incorrect businesses.”Later, in his interview with Trey Gowdy on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis rattled off acronyms — E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance investing) was just one — without explaining what they meant.DeSantis is ready to hit Trump — only indirectlyMr. DeSantis made clear on Wednesday that he isn’t ready to punch Mr. Trump just yet — but he signaled where he will aim once he does.He went through the Twitter Spaces session and two interviews — one on Fox News with Mr. Gowdy, his former congressional colleague, and the other on the radio with the conservative host Mark Levin — without uttering Mr. Trump’s name. (The word did come out of his mouth at one point: “Merit must trump identity politics,” the governor said during the Twitter talk.)But his attempts to contrast himself with the nameless one were frequent.Mr. DeSantis said on Fox News that the reason Mr. Biden could get away with “shenanigans” at the southern border was because there was not a wall protecting it. Mr. DeSantis promised to build a “full” border wall — a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s failure to keep that signature promise.Mr. DeSantis also previewed a line of attack he is expected to center his campaign on: Mr. Trump’s personnel appointments in his first term.Mr. DeSantis blamed the Federal Reserve — Jerome H. Powell was appointed the Fed’s chair by Mr. Trump — for exacerbating inflation. And he said he would fire the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, another Trump appointee, on Day 1. (A Trump senior adviser noted on Twitter that Mr. DeSantis publicly supported the selection of Mr. Wray at the time.)Mr. DeSantis took his sharpest jab at Mr. Trump in the final moments with Mr. Gowdy, who asked him what he would say to candidates who may not want to debate. It was a clear reference to Mr. Trump, who has indicated he may skip one or both of the first Republican debates. Mr. DeSantis, who needs the debates in order to have breakout moments, called for people to take part.“Nobody’s entitled to anything in this world, Trey, you’ve got to earn it,” Mr. DeSantis said. “That’s exactly what I intend to do, and I think the debates are a big part of the process.”DeSantis made his case as a China hawkMr. DeSantis previewed his hard-line policies to confront the Chinese Communist Party. While Mr. Trump focused largely on the trade dimension of the relationship during his presidency, Mr. DeSantis talked more broadly about countering China’s influence, territorial expansion and military ambitions.On Fox News, Mr. DeSantis called for a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine to counter China’s influence in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine, laid out by President James Monroe in the early 19th century, warned European countries not to colonize America’s backyard.Mr. DeSantis also said the U.S. needed to form stronger partnerships with India, Australia and other allies to counter Chinese expansion in the Pacific. And he called for the reshoring of critical manufacturing — saying the U.S. was too closely mingled, economically, with China.His remarks indicated that as president, Mr. DeSantis would be more comprehensively aggressive against China than Mr. Trump was in his first term. Mr. Trump spent the first three years of his presidency mostly averting his gaze from China’s military expansionism and human-rights abuses because he wanted a trade deal with Beijing. Mr. DeSantis has signaled he wants to confront China from the outset on all fronts.DeSantis plans broad use of executive powerMr. DeSantis laid the groundwork for what his allies say will be one of his most important contrasts against Mr. Trump: his skill in using power effectively.In his Twitter Spaces live chat, Mr. DeSantis talked about his extensive record of enacting conservative policies as governor in Florida. He cited his talent for using governmental power for conservative ends. He said he had studied the “different leverage points under Article 2” of the Constitution and would put that knowledge to work if elected president. On Fox News, he repeated his plans to use Article 2 to remake the government.Mr. DeSantis hinted that he would be more heavy-handed than Mr. Trump was with the federal bureaucracy. It is part of one of his core arguments: that not only will he fight harder than Mr. Trump but that he’ll deliver sweeping change where the former president fell short.In his interview on Fox News, he portrayed the F.B.I. as one of many federal agencies run amok, and said he would exert much stronger control over the entire Justice Department.He rejected the notion that presidents should view these agencies as independent and said if, as president, he learned that F.B.I. officials were colluding with tech companies — a reference to requests by government officials to Twitter to take down content viewed as harmful — then “everybody involved with that would be fired.” More

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      Ron DeSantis Joins 2024 Race, Hoping to Topple Trump

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      Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited official entry into the 2024 presidential campaign went haywire at its start on Wednesday during a glitch-filled livestream over Twitter.Despite the problems, Mr. DeSantis, the combative 44-year-old Republican governor of Florida who has championed conservative causes and thrown a yearslong flurry of punches at America’s left, provides Donald J. Trump the most formidable Republican rival he has faced since his ascent in 2016. His candidacy comes at a pivotal moment for the Republican Party, which must choose between aligning once more behind Mr. Trump — who lost in 2020 and continues to rage falsely about a stolen election — or uniting around a new challenger to take on President Biden.But on Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis’s official run for the White House got off to an embarrassing start as the planned livestream with Twitter’s eccentric billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was marred by technical problems and dead air. The audio cut in and out amid talk of “melting the servers,” hot mic whispering and on-the-spot troubleshooting.When, after more than 25 minutes, Mr. DeSantis finally spoke, he declared, “I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback.”The extended social media hiccup — as more than 500,000 people were waiting — was gleefully cheered on the very platform Mr. DeSantis was supposed to be commandeering for his campaign. Donald Trump Jr. wrote a single word: “#DeSaster.” Mr. Biden posted a donation button to his re-election campaign with the words, “This link works.” The audience when Mr. DeSantis did deliver his remarks was smaller than it had been during the initial minutes when no one was speaking.Despite his inauspicious start on Wednesday and having slipped well behind Mr. Trump in polls in recent months, Mr. DeSantis retains a host of strengths: a mountain of cash, a robust campaign operation and a series of conservative policy victories in Florida after a landslide re-election triumph last fall. The governor, who rose to national prominence with his restriction-averse handling of the coronavirus pandemic, argues that his “Florida Blueprint” can be a model for reshaping the United States in a starkly conservative mold, especially on social issues.“American decline is not inevitable,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It is a choice. And we should choose a new direction, a path that will lead to American revitalization.” He accused Mr. Biden of taking “his cues from the woke mob.”Mr. DeSantis did not mention Mr. Trump by name. But he did sketch out some of the contrasts he is expected to sharpen in the coming months. “We must look forward, not backwards,” he said on the Twitter Space livestream. “We need the courage to lead and we must have the strength to win.”The DeSantis campaign had invited prominent donors to Miami on Wednesday for a fund-raising event, hosting them at a conference space at the Four Seasons as the Twitter discussion was projected onto a large screen. Then they waited. And waited.“Elon’s got to staff up a little more to boost that server capacity,” said Brandon Rosner, a donor from Milwaukee. He was not discouraged. “Once we got through the original glitch there, I think people were very excited,” he said.Mr. DeSantis is confronting the daunting endeavor of toppling a former president whose belligerence and loyal base of support have discouraged most leading Republicans from making frontal attacks against him. Mr. Trump, who has a mounting list of legal troubles, clearly sees Mr. DeSantis as a political threat and has unloaded on him for months, mocking him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and slamming his stewardship of Florida.“Trump is not as invincible as he once seemed and DeSantis is a serious contender,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist. “There are Republican voters looking for someone who can move beyond Trump, someone who can fight the liberals but also win elections. That’s the space DeSantis is trying to inhabit.”Mr. DeSantis’s chances of capturing the nomination may depend on whether the Republican primary becomes a crowded, Trump-dominated food fight — something similar to what unfolded in 2016 — or if he can turn the contest into a two-man race. The Republican field has slowly ballooned, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina announcing a bid this week and Vice President Mike Pence expected to join soon.To winnow the field back down, Mr. DeSantis is likely to need strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two nominating states, with anti-Trump voters coalescing around him. His advisers and allies see a victory in socially conservative Iowa as a must, and believe he needs to follow with at least a close second-place finish in more moderate New Hampshire.Mr. DeSantis has the financial ammunition to compete: He is likely to start with more money in an outside group than any Republican primary candidate in history. He has more than $80 million expected to be transferred from his state account to his super PAC, which says it has also raised $40 million, in addition to having tens of millions more in donor commitments, according to people familiar with the fund-raising.A key focus of the primary, and the general election should Mr. DeSantis make it that far, will be his record as governor. He and a pliant Florida Legislature have passed contentious laws that have excited the right and angered many Democrats, including Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people, students and abortion-rights supporters in Florida. The bills seem to reflect Mr. DeSantis’s plan to run to the right of Mr. Trump in the primary, which could leave him vulnerable with moderates and independents.In the most recent legislative session alone, Florida Republicans banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy; expanded the use of the death penalty; allowed Floridians to carry concealed guns without a permit; restricted gender-transition care for minors; limited teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation; defunded diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public colleges; and shielded records of his own scrutinized travel from the public.Mr. DeSantis has also shown a willingness to use executive power in ways little seen before in Tallahassee, the state capital, leading some Democrats and civil rights leaders to worry that he shares Mr. Trump’s strongman style but has a greater ability to carry out that vision.He has picked a long-running fight with Disney, one of Florida’s largest employers and a canny political adversary. He removed a local prosecutor from office in what records show was a decision motivated by politics, installed his allies at a public liberal arts university in a bid to transform it into a bastion of conservative thought, said he would reject a high school Advanced Placement course on African American studies for “indoctrinating” students and had state law enforcement officers monitor holiday drag shows for lewd behavior.While his stump speech focuses on a lengthy recounting of those and other conservative policy achievements, Mr. DeSantis is expected to start talking more about his biography, with help from his wife, Casey DeSantis, a former television journalist who plays an influential role in his office and decision-making.Raised in Dunedin, a suburb of Tampa, Mr. DeSantis grew up in a working-class home. He excelled at baseball, captaining the squad at Yale University as a hard-hitting outfielder.He later enrolled at Harvard Law School, then served in the Navy as a military lawyer, deploying to Guantánamo Bay and Iraq. He worked as a federal prosecutor in Florida before winning election to Congress in 2012. He was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of anti-establishment conservatives.After three terms in Washington, he ran for Florida’s open governorship, winning the Republican primary largely thanks to an endorsement from Mr. Trump. But they fell out when Mr. DeSantis began making noises about running for president in 2024.The pandemic turned Mr. DeSantis into a Fox News fixture. He has criticized social distancing measures, masks and vaccines — tools fitfully employed by the Trump administration — and has already hinted that he will contrast his actions in Florida with Mr. Trump’s approach. In particular, Mr. DeSantis has gone after Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who led the nation’s pandemic response.But the step-up from a statewide campaign, even one as successful as Mr. DeSantis’s nearly 20-percentage-point romp, to a presidential campaign is not easy. As the initial Twitter Space floundered on Wednesday, Mr. Musk was forced to post a new link, severely reducing the audience for Mr. DeSantis’s announcement.While more than 500,000 people tuned in to the first Twitter Space, the second one had only 163,000 listeners by the time Mr. Musk and the technology entrepreneur David Sacks began interviewing the governor. The conversation quickly turned into a surprisingly dry discussion about the overreach of federal agencies, the merits of Twitter and occasionally bizarre tangents like the license plate number of Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and joined the online conversation.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign tried to put a positive spin on the technical mishaps, writing on Twitter: “It seems we broke the internet with so much excitement.” An aide announced they had raised $1 million in an hour. All the while, Mr. Trump’s team rejoiced. “This is criminal for a campaign,” said Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the former president.Mr. DeSantis had waited months to declare his candidacy, citing a need for Florida’s Legislature to first complete its session in early May. The delay allowed Mr. Trump to test out attacks on Mr. DeSantis and secure the endorsement of numerous members of Congress, including several from Florida.As Mr. DeSantis ramped up his presidential preparations this year with a book tour and a trip abroad, he has seemed to struggle at points.Awkward moments — including cringeworthy facial expressions — generated negative headlines. So did some poorly calculated policy pronouncements, particularly his declaration that defending Ukraine from the Russian invasion was not a vital U.S. interest. Some major donors who once saw him as the most suitable Trump challenger backed away.At the heart of the criticism is the perception that Mr. DeSantis, a supreme believer in his own abilities, can seem aloof and quick to anger. Even his allies acknowledge he is not the backslapping, baby-kissing type — concerns he has tried to address by spending more time greeting voters and taking selfies.“He is an introvert in an extrovert’s job,” said Alex Andrade, a Republican state representative from the Florida Panhandle who says he admires the governor’s reserved and analytical approach.In recent weeks, Mr. DeSantis has seemed to recover from his wobbles, hitting back with more force against Mr. Trump. He has criticized the former president for not endorsing Florida’s six-week abortion ban and has described a “culture of losing” overtaking the Republican Party under Mr. Trump. He also told donors in a private call that Mr. Trump could not beat Mr. Biden.In the Twitter event, Mr. DeSantis took some sideswipes at the former president, a onetime reality television star, at one point saying, “Government is not entertainment. It’s not about building a brand or virtue-signaling.”As they wrapped up the hourlong conversation, which meandered from Article 2 of the Constitution to Bitcoin, Mr. DeSantis said, “We should do it again. I mean, I think it was fun.”Mr. Sacks concurred. “It’s not how you start,” he added, “it’s how you finish.”Jonathan Swan More

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      Unprepared Republicans Are Flooding Into the Presidential Race

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      On Wednesday, the charmless and awkward Ron DeSantis entered the presidential race. In 2024 Republican primary polling, he consistently comes in second to Donald Trump. He has built his legend on an easy re-election as Florida’s governor and an easy route by which he enacted a slate of bullying and regressive “anti-woke” legislation, thanks to Republicans’ supermajorities in Florida’s Legislature.He brandishes his record as evidence of his effectiveness, but all he’s done is win a series of fights in which his opponents had their hands tied by being in the minority.Yet many Republican commentators and donors, who’ve been desperate to move on from the toxicity of Trump, landed on DeSantis when casting about for alternatives. They inflated his ego, convincing him his big-footing in Florida made him formidable.He appears to be banking on Trump fatigue, or maybe Trump’s legal problems piling so high that even the former president’s most ardent supporters come to the conclusion that he is too encumbered to prevail. If he can’t outpace Trump, he’ll lie in wait to catch him limping.He’s not alone in that lane. The candidates (or potential candidates) Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson and Chris Sununu — all current or former governors — occupy the same lane. They are the in-case-of-emergency-break-glass cohort: If Trump winds up on the path to prison and Republicans must scrounge for a last-minute replacement, they’re hoping that voters see them as solid substitutes.They’re positioned as candidates who can deliver on Republican policy priorities without Trump’s baggage and Trump’s drama — but Trump’s drama is the thing that many of his supporters are addicted to. The policies are welded to the persona.Trump allows his supporters to feel and express their full range of emotion: He entertains them; he channels their rage; he reflects their oppressive urges; he’s an oracle of their self-perceived victimhood and their model of a warrior against a government and culture that they feel are turning on them.Trumpism is a whole-self experience, spiritual in its depth, so Trumpism without Trump would be akin to preaching Christianity without Christ.And then there’s Republicans’ other lane, in which racial absolution without racial repentance is offered. It’s occupied by candidates of color who advance some version of this simplistic and opaque absolution: “America is not a racist country.”Let me be clear: Is every person in America racist? No. Is race the superseding consideration and determinant for all negative outcomes for people of color? No. But was racism a foundational principle of our country? Does racism still permeate American society and its institutions? Yes.And racism abhors its own name; it hates to be called what it is.In recent election cycles, Republicans have embraced candidates who provided a version of that message — Herman Cain in 2012, Ben Carson in 2016 — even as their party has been rightly condemned for its tan-suit-faux-scandal-level anti-Barack Obama obsession, which was consistently colored by race.And now they have two candidates who’ve used those exact words: When she began her candidacy in February, Nikki Haley said, “Take it from me, the first minority female governor in history: America is not a racist country.” And when he announced his candidacy on Monday, Tim Scott — whom she appointed to his Senate seat — repeated a line he delivered in a 2021 speech: “America is not a racist country.”Scott’s policy positions — which straddle the Republican MAGA wing and the party’s limping Jack Kemp wing — are not his selling point. He sells a narrative, however distorted — a frozen smile for a fanatical party.Haley is also in this lane.She and Scott are using their own personal and political successes, not as exceptional examples of clearing hurdles, but to argue the height of the hurdles and to question the will of other runners.They, too, are probably waiting for legal lightning to strike, for Trump to become politically incapacitated and the Republican primary field to be thrown wide open.But Trump will fight to the last breath, maybe not because he wants to be president again, but because he wants to hedge against becoming a prisoner.All the Republican challengers are governed by ambition, but Trump is now governed by a more powerful force: panic.Yes, if he is elected again, he will get to claim that in the end he bested Biden. But he’s also aware that if he regains the presidency, he regains the power to blunt pending federal investigations swirling around him and to force a crisis over any state criminal proceedings, like one that may materialize in Georgia.He wants to complicate any potential prosecutions by arousing the anger of his followers, giving rule-of-law-following institutionalists pause about the consequences of penalizing a president. Trump has shown that he has no qualms about breaking the country to save himself, that patriotism is a distant second to self-preservation.Trump has spent his life swaddled in creature comforts, gilded and gauche as they may be. He’s bent the rules so often that he seems to have forgotten that the legal system has a gravity that few can escape forever.Now, with the prospect of being shamed and maybe even shackled, he’s going to spare nothing in his quest to clear the Republican field — and none of his opponents look as if they’re ready for it.If you thought the last two election cycles were ugly, strap up: This one will likely be worse. All creatures are most ferocious when backed into a corner.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Strategic Fashioning of Casey DeSantis

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      With an eye to the Kennedys, and the Trumps. Sometimes, a wardrobe is a strategy.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has finally, officially, entered the presidential race. The long-anticipated Trump-DeSantis matchup is about to hit prime time. Which means that so, too, is what Mr. DeSantis himself called in his recent book, “The Courage to Be Free,” the “Ron and Casey traveling road show,” a Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago by way of Disney series that is now going national. And while Mr. DeSantis may be the nominal star, it is his wife, in her supporting role, who has been making the most notable entrances.At least judging by the previews that have been playing for the past few months at most of Mr. DeSantis’s major public events, including his re-election night celebration in November 2022, his inauguration in January, his State of the State speech in March and his trip to Japan last month. Throughout, Ms. DeSantis, 42, a former television news anchor, mother of three and breast cancer survivor, has demonstrated a facility with the power of the visual statement, and the way it can tap into the national hive mind, that has been as strategic, and big picture, as that of any political spouse in modern memory.“She understands the image game and how to play it,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist who masterminded communications for the confirmation of the Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. “How to maximize the levers of attention and the media.”Put another way, while Mr. DeSantis may be talking presidential policy, Ms. DeSantis has been making him look the part, primarily by “dressing her part,” said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.” By using all sorts of synaptic cues to connect what we see to what we think, she triggers associations with terms like “Kennedy” and “Trump” and even “royalty” — not as odd a grouping as it may first appear, given that Kennedy was the first TV president, Trump the first reality TV president and Ms. DeSantis clearly a student of both.Ms. DeSantis with her husband at a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister in Tokyo in April, wearing an ice blue Badgley Mischka dress that looks similar to …Pool photo by Eugene Hoshiko… the ice blue dress Jacqueline Kennedy wore to meet Prime Minister Nehru in the gardens of the presidential palace in New Delhi in 1962.Getty ImagesShe has the bouncing, glowing Breck locks of Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” (the 1991 animated version) and Catherine, Princess of Wales mixed up with the full-skirted pastel wardrobe of a well-mannered debutante, some fleece and a cape or two. She’s “dressing to be either princess of the world or first lady,” said Tom Broecker, the costume designer for “Saturday Night Live” and “House of Cards,” who has made something of an art of studying and replicating the style of first ladies. “There’s so much intentionality and purpose behind everything.”To acknowledge that is not to undercut her substance — the work she has done for mental health, cancer research, hurricane relief — but to credit her with understanding a basic truth of modern campaigning. “Presidential campaigns are M.R.I.s for the soul,” said David M. Axelrod, the founder of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and a former senior adviser to Barack Obama. “Folks are not just evaluating your positions, they are evaluating you as a person.” To that end, he said, “spouses play a really important role in filling out that picture.”Picture, in this case, being the operative word.The Camelot ConnectionThough Ms. DeSantis has always been a considered dresser, a lesson from her days as a local anchor with WJXT in Jacksonville, Fla., when she and Mr. DeSantis met, she has ratcheted up her style over the past year. On election night in 2022, she wore a floor-length gold and yellow one-shoulder ruched gown that made her look as if she were on her way to a state dinner, rather than simply taking the stage in the Tampa Convention Center.It was her outfit on inauguration day in January, however, that really foreshadowed the couple’s ambitions in the public eye: a mint-green dress by Alex Perry, an Australian label, with a built-in cape flowing from the shoulders, worn with white gloves. In its color and line, it seemed to draw its lineage straight from the Kennedy era. This was only compounded by the bright pink dress Ms. DeSantis wore to her husband’s State of the State address, with a portrait neckline and more white gloves, another seeming nod to Jacqueline Kennedy, one of the most recognizable, revered and stylish first ladies in American history. Ditto the ice-blue dress she wore to accompany Mr. DeSantis to Japan, another caped style, this time with floral epaulets at the shoulders.It’s a smart move, even if it can also seem like a cliché (clichés are clichés, after all, because they are part of common parlance). As Michael LaRosa, a communications strategist who was Jill Biden’s spokesman during her husband’s 2020 primary campaign for the White House, said: “Americans love glitz, glamour and attractiveness, celebrities and TV. Casey DeSantis understands all of that.”Déjà vu dressing: (clockwise from top left) Casey DeSantis at the governor’s State of the State address in May; Jacqueline Kennedy on a boat ride in Udaipur, India, in 1962; Mrs. Kennedy at her daughter’s wedding in Hyannis Port, Mass., in 1986; Ms. DeSantis at the her husband’s inauguration in January. Clockwise from top left, Phil Sears/Associated Press; Cecil Stoughton/FK Presidential Library/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; PL Gould/Getty Images; Lynne Sladky/Associated PressBy connecting herself and her husband implicitly to the Kennedy tradition, Ms. DeSantis connects to myriad ideas rooted in the American narrative: youth and generational change (not incidental when two of the other candidates are setting records as the oldest in history), glamour and taste. Blink, and a button deep in the cerebral cortex gets pushed.Never more so than when she dons her capes and gloves, accessories from the costume department freighted with meaning, trailing whiffs of kings and queens as well as old-fashioned morality and gender roles. The clothes both act as a “disguise for how political and strategic she is,” Ms. Brower said, and support her husband’s position as a warrior for conservative values.So while Ms. DeSantis may be, as The New York Post called her, the governor’s “not-so-secret political weapon” and, according to Politico, a “superstar of a political spouse” who is “unusually important and uncommonly involved,” with her own portfolio, the broad-stroke portrait is of the classic helpmeet smiling charmingly in the background.“She has been able to use her position to showcase what they could be,” Mr. Bonjean said.According to Mr. Broecker, she is “manifesting the message.”Beyond TrumpAnd the image-making is not limited to herself. Like Catherine, Princess of Wales, Ms. DeSantis is adept at color-coordinating the couple’s young children for their public appearances, the better to present a snapshot of family unity: the two little girls wearing matching dresses and pinafores, their brother echoing their father. She and Mr. DeSantis even wore matching white rubber shrimp boots when viewing the damage after Hurricane Ian.It all makes for an implicit contrast to the current Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, whose own children have been divided during the campaign (Ivanka staying away, Tiffany largely absent) and whose wife, Melania, has been largely absent since his announcement.Ms. DeSantis wearing a Republican red Trina Turk caped dress at a news conference with Governor DeSantis in Miami in May, 2022, which looked very much like …Joe Raedle/Getty Images… the red caped Givenchy gown Melania Trump wore when she and President Trump attended a dinner with Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in London in 2019.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd though Ms. DeSantis shares a certain style ethos with Ms. Trump, her clothes are more aspirational than elitist, sourced largely from the contemporary, as opposed to luxury, market, with an emphasis on brands like Ted Baker (the blue coat she wore for her husband’s first inauguration), Badgley Mischka (the caped dress and white floral pantsuit she wore in Japan) and Shoshanna (that gold and yellow ruched gown).All of which fits with the more accessible narrative the campaign is building around her — especially when combined with the zip-up athletic jackets with the Florida state flag on the breast that she tends to wear with jeans when meeting constituents on the road.Put another way, both Ms. DeSantis and Ms. Trump may have worn Republican-red caped gowns at different times, but while Ms. Trump’s was Givenchy, Ms. DeSantis’s appears to have been Trina Turk. Ms. Brower called the effect “Melania lite” — easier for most people to digest.Yet Ms. DeSantis also chose a label for her official portrait — Chiara Boni La Petite Robe — that is the unofficial uniform of the women of Trumpland, a favorite of Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Kayleigh McEnany and Jeanine Pirro, thanks to its ability to play to both boss lady and the male gaze. All of which underscores her husband’s pitch that he is the palatable alternative to Trump: familiar, but less baggage.Casey DeSantis in an official portrait as Florida’s first lady, in 2019, wearing Chiara Boni La Petite Robe.Colin HackleyThe DeSantis team declined to comment on Ms. DeSantis’s role, but for those who think her image-making is simply happenstance or a fortuitous coincidence, consider the fact that in his book Mr. DeSantis notes that it was Ms. DeSantis who asked him to wear his naval “dress white uniform” for their wedding, complete with all his medals, though he had planned on wearing a tux.She also held an on-air competition, he wrote, so viewers could vote on what wedding dress she should wear. When it came time to walk down the aisle, Mr. DeSantis wrote, she looked “less like a TV anchor and more like a princess.” Together, however, they looked like nothing so much as cosplay from the triumphant finales of both “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “A Few Good Men.”In other words, from the beginning Ms. DeSantis was thinking about the images that would be captured for posterity and their public repercussions, and “I was happy to defer to my bride on that call,” Mr. DeSantis wrote. Odds are that pattern will continue.After all, when you can deploy a spouse in a primary, Mr. LaRosa said, “it’s the equivalent of having the advantage of two candidates.” You get twice the airtime and twice the eyeballs.Indeed, Mr. Bonjean said, “The team will do everything they can to get attention. And she will be a big part of that.” More

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      The DeSantis Delusion

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      If Ron DeSantis is supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump, why did he sign a ban on most abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It flattens that pitch into a sad little pancake.If DeSantis is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? Yes, the corporation publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and that must have annoyed him. He’s easily annoyed. But the legislation was always going to pass anyway, and he indeed got what he substantively wanted, so there was no need to try to punish Disney and supercharge the conflict — except that he wanted to make a big, manly show of his contempt for the mighty Mouse. He wanted, well, drama. So there goes that rationale as well.And if DeSantis, 44, is supposed to be tomorrow’s Trump, a youthful refurbishment of the 76-year-old former president, why does he seem so yesteryear? From his style of hair to his dearth of flair, from his emotional remove to his fugitive groove, there’s something jarringly anti-modern about the Florida governor. He’s more T-Bird than Tesla, though even that’s too generous, as he’s also more sedan than coupe.On Wednesday he’s expected to rev his engine and make the official, anticlimactic announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. I just don’t get it. Oh, I get that he wants to be the boss of all bosses — that fits. But the marketing of DeSantis and the fact of DeSantis don’t square. Team DeSantis’s theory of the case and the case itself diverge. In many ways, he cancels himself out. His is a deeply, deeply puzzling campaign.Which doesn’t mean it won’t be successful. Right around the time Trump was declared the 2016 winner, I exited the prediction business, or at least tried to incorporate more humility into my own storefront, and I humbly concede that I feel no certainty whatsoever about DeSantis’s fate.He has a legitimate shot at the Republican presidential nomination. He absolutely could win the presidency. He governs the country’s third most populous state, was re-elected to a second term there by a nearly 19-point margin, wowed key donors, raised buckets of money and has widespread name recognition. To go by polls of Republican voters over recent months, they’re fonder of him than of any of the other alternatives to Trump. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson would kill to have the kind of buzz that DeSantis has, which mostly tells you how buzzless their own candidacies are.But do Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so. According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage points behind DeSantis.There’s an argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him. Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop anytime soon?But if, between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump, the number of contenders keeps expanding.Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors — Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Doug Burgum of North Dakota — remain possibilities. That’s one potentially crowded debate stage, putting a premium on precisely the kind of oomph DeSantis lacks. Next to him, Pence sizzles.Most of these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their own.And DeSantis has teetered, time and again. His more-electable argument is undercut not only by that Florida abortion law — which, tellingly, he seems to avoid talking about — but also by the measure he recently signed to allow the carrying of concealed firearms in Florida without a permit. That potentially puts him to the right of the post-primary electorate, as do some of the specific details — and the combined force — of legislation that he championed regarding education, the death penalty, government transparency and more. In trying to show the right wing of the Republican Party how aggressive and effective he can be, he has rendered himself nearly as scary to less conservative Americans as Trump is.And as mean. The genius of Scott’s announcement was its emphasis on optimism instead of ire as a point of contrast with Trump, in the unlikely event that such a contrast is consequential. “Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory?” Scott said. “Grievance or greatness?” Victimhood, grievance — gee, whoever could Scott have in mind? But DeSantis is all about grievance and retribution, and he’s oh so grim. He sent two planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He exults that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” How sunny! It’s the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.His assertion that he wants to end Republicans’ “culture of losing” is an anagram for the accusation that Trump has prevented the party from winning, but I doubt the dig will resonate strongly with the Republican base. As Ramesh Ponnuru sagely observed in The Washington Post recently, Trump’s supposed toxicity is a longstanding part of his story and his brand. “For many conservatives,” Ponnuru wrote, “Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that ‘electability’ is a ploy used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are willing to fight for them.”The campaigns of DeSantis and the other would-be Trump slayers rest on the usual mix of outsize vanity, uncommon ambition and stubborn hopefulness in politicians who reach for the upper rungs.But their bids rest on something else, too — something I share, something so many of us do, something that flies in the face of all we’ve seen and learned over the eight years since Trump came down that escalator, something we just can’t shake: the belief that a liar, narcissist and nihilist of his mammoth dimensions cannot possibly endure, and that the forces of reason and caution will at long last put an end to his perverse dominance.DeSantis is betting on that without fully and boldly betting on that. It’s a hedged affair, reflecting the fact that it may be a doomed one.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).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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      Why It’s Far Too Soon to Say DeSantis Is Done

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      Despite his struggles, fortunes can change very quickly in presidential primaries.Will Ron DeSantis start attacking Donald Trump?Sophie Park for The New York TimesIs the Ron DeSantis campaign already over?After the last few months, it’s hard not to wonder. His poll numbers have plummeted. Would-be donors seem skeptical. Pundits have questioned whether he should even run at all.But as he finally announces a presidential bid, expected later today, it is worth mulling his path back to contention. Despite it all, Ron DeSantis could still be the next Republican nominee.That might seem hard to imagine, but fortunes can change astonishingly quickly in presidential primaries. There are still more than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and there will be plenty of opportunities for him to right his ship.In the end, the factors that made Mr. DeSantis formidable at the beginning of the year could prove to be more significant than the stumbles and miscues that have recently hobbled him. The damage is not yet irreparable.Of course, the fact that he could mount a comeback doesn’t mean he will come back. His campaign’s decision to announce his bid on Twitter tonight forfeits a rare opportunity to be televised live on multiple networks in favor of a feature, Twitter Spaces, that I don’t even know how to use as a frequent Twitter user. And even if his campaign is ultimately run differently than it has been so far, it’s not clear that even a perfectly run Republican campaign would defeat Donald J. Trump — at least if the former president survives his various legal challenges politically unscathed.But if you’re tempted to write off Mr. DeSantis, you might want to think again. The history of primary elections is littered with candidates who are written off, only to surge into contention. Unknown candidates like Herman Cain briefly become front-runners. Early front-runners like Joe Biden and John McCain are written off, then come back to win. Even Barack Obama spent six months struggling and trailing an “inevitable” Hillary Clinton by double digits.Perhaps one day we’ll say something similar about Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. As with the candidates who ultimately surged back to victory, the strengths that made Mr. DeSantis seem so promising after the midterms are still there today. He still has unusually broad appeal throughout the Republican Party. His favorability ratings remain strong — stronger than Mr. Trump’s — even though his standing against Mr. Trump has deteriorated in head-to-head polling. He is still defined by issues — like the fight against “woke” and coronavirus restrictions — that also have broad appeal throughout his party. If this was enough to be a strong contender in January, there’s reason it might be again.While it’s easy to see Mr. DeSantis’s decline over the last few months as a sign of profound weakness, the volatility of the polling can also be interpreted to mean there’s a large group of voters open to both candidates. They might be prone to lurch one way or the other, depending on the way the political winds are blowing.Mr. DeSantis’s strategy so far this year may have also increased the likelihood of big swings. As I wrote last week, there are two theories for defeating the former president — Trumpism without Trump, and a reinvigorated conservative alternative to Trump. Of the two, the proto-DeSantis campaign can more easily be interpreted as a version of Trumpism without Trump. If his campaign has done anything, it’s to narrow any disagreement with Mr. Trump — even to a fault. Mr. DeSantis hasn’t really made either an explicit or implicit case against the former president. Perhaps worse, he hasn’t punched back after being attacked.This combination of choices has helped set up an unusually rapid decline in Mr. DeSantis’s support. After all, the only thing that unifies a hypothetical Trumpism without Trump coalition is opposition to Mr. Trump and the prospect of beating him. If you’re not attacking him and you’re losing to him, then you’re not saying or doing the only two things that can hold your supporters together.The evaporating basis for Mr. DeSantis’s support has played out subtly differently on two different fronts. On the right, conservative voters open to someone other than Mr. Trump nonetheless have returned to the side of the former president. What kind of conservative wants Trumpism without strength? Toward the center, the many relatively moderate and neoconservative establishment Republicans who yearn for a candidacy opposed to Trumpism, not just to the conduct of the man himself, have withheld crucial support for Mr. DeSantis and flirted with other options, from Chris Christie to Chris Sununu.But if the DeSantis campaign can revitalize the case for his Trumpism without Trump candidacy, he might quickly reclaim many of the voters who backed him a few months ago. Indeed, it’s even possible that the current media narrative and low expectations are setting the stage for a DeSantis resurgence.Imagine what it might feel like if he launched a successful, vigorous attack against Mr. Trump after all of these months on defense. What might have otherwise been a routine sparring match would be imbued with far greater significance, unleashing months of pent-up anxiety among his supporters. What if part of the reason he’s announcing his candidacy on Twitter is to mock Truth Social? Silly as it sounds, successfully putting down Mr. Trump might breathe life into his candidacy — and the media loves a comeback story.One important factor keeping Mr. DeSantis’s path open is that, so far, none of the potential moderate alternatives to him have gained a foothold in the race. If they did, it would deny him the moderate and neoconservative voters who supported the likes of John Kasich and Marco Rubio in the last primary. He would essentially become another Ted Cruz.But for now, Mr. DeSantis is the only viable not-Trump candidate in town. As long as that’s true, he will have every chance to rebound among the voters who would prefer someone other than Mr. Trump — if there is a market for someone other than Mr. Trump.In the end, whether there’s sufficient demand for a Trump alternative may be the bigger question than whether Mr. DeSantis can resuscitate his campaign. With Mr. Trump already holding more than 50 percent support in the polls, actually defeating Mr. Trump might require some breaks, like the possibility that his legal challenges are worse than we might assume. It might also require a DeSantis win in Iowa to break Mr. Trump’s grip on a crucial segment of the party, much as the midterms seemed to temporarily crack Mr. Trump’s base last winter.But even if Mr. Trump is a clear favorite, it’s easy to see how Mr. DeSantis can at least make this a competitive race again. When he’s able to focus on his own issues, he has a distinctive political brand with rare appeal throughout a divided Republican Party. With expectations so low, the groundwork for a recovery might even be in place. It’s happened before. More