Ron DeSantis is girding for battle with Donald Trump where he believes the former president may be most vulnerable to attack from a fellow Republican: on substance.
DeSantis, the Florida governor, is expected to make a series of policy based arguments, according to his public statements and interviews with people who have met with him privately and described their conversations on the condition of anonymity.
He is telling Republicans that, unlike the mercurial Trump, he can be trusted to adhere to conservative principles; that Trump is too distractible and undisciplined to deliver conservative policy victories such as completing his much-hyped border wall; and that any policy promises Trump makes to conservatives are worthless because he is incapable of defeating President Biden.
DeSantis' challenge is obvious to anyone who has seen a recent poll: Trump maintains a deep psychological hold over many Republican voters who appear immune to reasoned arguments against him.
The thrice-married Trump, who stands accused of hush-money payments to women including a porn star, has never been the avatar of a social conservative. But he largely governed as one. That he was motivated more by transaction than by conviction was irrelevant to millions of evangelicals who cheered as he brought about a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
But DeSantis is expected to argue that the reason Trump made so many ideologically inexplicable personnel decisions – like elevating Dr. Anthony Fauci at the outset of the Covid crisis – was because he has no fixed principles to fall back on when he faced difficult decisions.
By contrast, allies say that DeSantis will try to make the case to Republican voters that they can trust him to stand his ground on tough issues like abortion.
Here are five of their likeliest friction points on policy.
• Abortion– Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, Trump has appeared uncomfortable with the consequences of his signature achievement. He privately blamed abortion hard-liners for Republicans' disappointing results in the midterm elections, has refused to say whether he would support a national abortion ban and implied Florida's new six-week abortion ban was "too harsh."
DeSantis has seized on those remarks, and his allies hope the issue helps him make inroads with the Christian right. "Protecting an unborn child when there's a detectable heartbeat is something that almost 99% of pro-lifers support," DeSantis said recently, noting that Trump, "as a Florida resident," hadn't said whether he would have signed "the heartbeat bill."
Still, despite supporting abortion rights for most of his adult life, Trump was the most consequential anti-abortion president in history. He reminds conservative audiences that while previous GOP presidents made plenty of promises, he was the one who ended Roe.
• Taking on Big Business– DeSantis and Trump differ in their approaches to corporate America.
DeSantis subscribes to the theory, popular among the self-described "New Right," that leftists have taken over so many American institutions – including academia, the media and big corporations – that conservatives are fools to cede these battlefields to progressives in the name of "limited government."
Instead, DeSantis argues that conservatives must use every lever of government power to fight back – and if that leaves traditional conservatives feeling squeamish, then so be it.
Trump has flirted with this idea but never fully bought into it. He has fought against so-called environmental, social and governance investments, railed against social media companies for their treatment of conservatives and enacted tariffs that enraged multinationals. But he also slashed taxes for corporations and invited chief executives he would later deride as "globalists" into the Oval Office and onto his business councils.
• China, Ukraine and NATO– Trump and DeSantis have split in important ways on two pivotal foreign policy questions: how to deal with China, andwhat role theUnited States should play in Ukraine's war against Russia.
Trump has been credited for prodding Republicans and Democrats into viewing China as a ruthless adversary rather than an imperfect trading partner. But for most of his presidency, Trump saw theU.S.-China relationship through a purely economic lens.
He praised President Xi Jinping of China as he chased a trade deal that he could trumpet to American farmers. He imposed tariffs on China but rejected other measures like sanctioning Chinese officials for human rights atrocities, lest that interfere with his trade deal. It was only in 2020, after Trump blamed the Chinese Communist Party for the spread of Covid, that he finally sidelined his administration's China doves and fully empowered its hawks.
DeSantis cares less about U.S.-China trade and more about the national security threats that Beijing poses. As governor, he signed a law banning Chinese social media platforms such as TikTok from state government devices and another that will stop many Chinese citizens and companies with ties to its government from buying property in Florida.
On Ukraine, Trump has gone further than DeSantis in ruling out American support for Kyiv. While Trump called Russia's invasion a "crime against humanity" in the early days of the war, he has more recently refused to draw any moral distinction between the Ukrainians and the Russians – saying only that a deal must be struck. He has mused about handing over chunks of Ukraine to Russia.
After dodging questions about Ukraine, DeSantis told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that defending Ukraine against Russia was not a vital U.S. interest and dismissed the war as a "territorial dispute." Stung by criticism, DeSantis walked back the "territorial dispute" line, and in a subsequent interview he called Putin a "war criminal." Trump refused to do the same when asked to on CNN.
While both Trump and DeSantis are contemptuous of international institutions such as the United Nations, the former president poses a more significant threat to the post-World War II international security framework.
Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, feared his boss would withdraw the United States from NATO and grew convinced he would do so if he won re-election to a second term. Now, Trump validates those fears on his campaign website, pledging to "finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally re-evaluating NATO's purpose and NATO's mission."
• Spending, Trade and the Fed– Trump and his super PAC have called out DeSantis' congressional votes to cut spending on Social Security and Medicare. DeSantis has said he won't "mess with" Social Security for seniors currently dependent on the program, but unlike Trump, he has not ruled out trimming entitlement spending in ways that would affect younger Americans when they retire.
Trump's allies plan to portray DeSantis as "weak" on trade – meaning he won't use tariffs as aggressively as the former president, who proudly branded himself "a tariff man" and launched trade wars with China and Europe. Trump has promised that in a second term he would introduce "a new system of universal baseline tariffs that rewards domestic production while taxing foreign companies."
DeSantis will contrast his budget surpluses in Florida to the trillions of dollars Trump added to the national debt when he was president. DeSantis will point out that as a member of Congress he voted against the trillion dollar-plus spending bills that Trump signed into law in 2017 and 2018. And DeSantis plans to tie Trump to high inflation by criticizing his appointment of Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair.
• Crime and Punishment– DeSantis has signed hard-line legislation on crime, including a law that lowers the threshold for imposing the death penalty.
Trump, who has cultivated a law and-order persona, undercut that image in office by allowing his more liberal son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to lead bipartisan negotiations on a criminal justice law that would shorten federal prison sentences. Trump quickly regretted signing that law, known as the First Step Act, and blamed Kushner.
Yet DeSantis' ability to directly attack Trump over the law is complicated by the fact that, along with most Republicans, he voted for the initial House version of it – one that focused narrowly on prison reform and was opposed by civil rights groups and many Democrats. The much different version that passed, enacted when DeSantis was no longer in Congress, included sentencing reforms and the ability to apply retroactively for a reduced sentence.
