Ron DeSantis’s backers are clinging to the exact same fiction indulged by anti-Trump forces in 2016: that a singularly unconventional opponent can be defeated through blandly conventional means.
On the Left, it’s become commonplace to say that Democrats have learned nothing from the catastrophe of 2016. But DeSantis’s nascent and already flailing candidacy suggests that much the same is true of the anti-Trump right, which evidently believes that it can generate an ersatz approximation of Trumpism simply by leaning into whatever the most feral sections of the Republican base are aggrieved about in a given week.
Given the racist, hard-right anti-immigration rhetoric Trump used to launch his campaign, this assumption isn’t completely without foundation. It does, however, elide the important areas in which Trump broke explicitly from what had been the GOP consensus during the eras of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan. Whether sincerely or not — and it turned out to be overwhelmingly the latter — candidate Trump embraced messaging on trade, social welfare, and industrial policy that made him sound distinctly unlike a conventional Republican. As Corey Robin observed in 2018: “Trump’s critique of plutocracy, defense of entitlements, and articulated sense of the market’s wounds were among the more noteworthy innovations of his campaign.”
If the DeSantis enterprise is floundering, then, a major reason is that its attempt to approximate Trumpism through pugilist culture war schtick reflects a flawed understanding of what ultimately made Trump’s 2016 campaign so effective.