Becoming the Republican Nominee Will Not Be Easy for Ron DeSantis

Since the midterm elections, something just short of a consensus has formed that Ron DeSantis will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. It is also assumed that along the way he will defeat Donald Trump and prevent the former president from winning a third straight Republican presidential nomination. This consensus is in part due to both smart Republican strategists, and there are still some, as well as center and center-left pundits, observers and journalists, wanting to believe it, albeit for totally different reasons.

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The Myth of the Republican Party Civil War

The view that the Republican Party is about to tear itself apart trying to wrestle with the legacy of the Trump administration is another case of the American political class wanting to believe the crisis is less acute than it really is. If we convince ourselves that Trumpism is on its way out, we can also convince ourselves that American democracy is still strong. This is intellectually lazy and politically dangerous. As partisan and ugly as it sounds, Trumpism is the Republican Party. There is no way to purge the latter of the former. Rather, they both need to be summarily defeated.

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The Long Reach of the Ukraine Scandal

What was once a question of whether or not the President sought to withhold military assistance for an ally unless they agreed to investigate Joe Biden, is now a scandal about corruption within the Trump administration that is so widespread that impeachment seems like only the beginning of a long judicial process. It is a scandal that ties together the avarice and greed of Trump and his cronies with their disturbing willingness to pursue policies that support Russia’s interests while simultaneously revealing their continued contempt for America election law, mores and processes.

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The Coming Bannon Pence Conflict

The biggest threat to Donald Trump for now will not come from the Democratic Party, as they simply do not have enough power in Congress or anywhere else at the moment. The President and his powerful supporters in Congress also have significant leverage over Republicans like Lindsay Graham who occasionally seem to be aware of the President’s conflicts of interests and disturbing relationship with Russia. The President is clearly rattled by critical media and massive demonstrations, but, at least for now, neither is going to bring him down. Instead, the biggest threat to the President could be the one person, any one person, who is both a senior figure in his administration and can plausibly claim to have not been involved with Russia.

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Why We Should Watch the Vice Presidential Debate

Pence and Kaine debating each other will, on substance, look no different than Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, but also of Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan in 1984, but it seems pretty clear that by the time the 2020 election rolls around, this partisan dynamic will have changed. Trump’s campaign has demonstrated that the GOP can no longer assume working class whites will vote for their economic royalist policies, while the Democratic primary made it clear that younger Democrats are no longer content with the incrementalism with which the Clintons have defined the Democratic Party for more than a generation. It is not clear what the next iteration of the American political party system will look like. The GOP might look very different after a Trump defeat or victory. It is also possible, although much less likely, that an opening will be created for a new party, but it is very hard to imagine the system returning to what it has looked like for the last 30 years.

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Lincoln Mitchell