Trump ‘F**king Hates DeSantis’ Or So Pompeo Would Have You Believe As Court Intrigue Builds For 2024

The GOP is in an intriguing position right now. It’s like a teeter totter with Donald Trump on one side and a bomb on the other. If Trump stays on the teeter totter and decides to place nice and run in 2024, then the party has a direction. Whether it’s a direction it should go in is a different question altogether, but it has a direction in any event. If, however, Trump gets off the teeter totter and just lets the other side drop, BLAU-EEE, look for “2016 on steroids. 25 or 30 people will be running for the nomination.”

Right now Ron DeSantis is the front runner, the golden boy of Fox News. But that doesn’t mean that all is sweetness and light. DeSantis has said that he won’t run if Trump does and how Trump feels about him is a topic of some debate. Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair:

DeSantis’s biggest challenge, though, will be navigating his fraught relationship with Trump. “Trump fucking hates DeSantis. He just resents his popularity,” a second Trump confidant told me. (“Ron is a good guy,” Trump said.) According to a source, advisers for Pompeo have been promoting DeSantis in hopes of stoking Trump’s jealousy. “Pompeo’s people are building up DeSantis as the leader of the Republican Party to piss Trump off,” the source said.

Part of Trump’s irritation with DeSantis is that Trump feels that DeSantis doesn’t give Trump enough credit for his rise. “Trump tells people, ‘I made Ron.’ Trump says that about a lot of people. But in this case, it’s actually true,” a prominent Republican said. (“He gives me good credit,” Trump told me.)

Trump also tells people how a trailing DeSantis “blew past everybody” once Trump gave him his benediction and blessing. DeSantis won by twenty points. That still doesn’t mean it’s all sweetness and light between the two.

Once in office, DeSantis irked Trump further by putting his political ambitions ahead of Trump’s demand for blind loyalty. According to a source, DeSantis announced publicly in the fall of 2019 that Trump would attend the Florida GOP’s annual statesman dinner before the White House signed off on the invitation, which effectively forced Trump to appear. Last year, I reported that DeSantis rejected Trump’s pleas to close Florida’s beaches as the pandemic raged. In the wake of the Surfside condo collapse in June, DeSantis and Trump clashed over Trump’s plan to hold a MAGA rally in Florida while the search for survivors continued. (Trump denied there was a dispute, but DeSantis didn’t attend the rally.) On July 1, DeSantis appeared alongside Biden and praised him for the federal government’s response to the tragedy. The moment recalled the greeting between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and President Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy.

DeSantis’ star may not stay in the ascendant with the Delta variant ravaging the state on the one hand, while he threatens to fine businesses $5,000 per offense if they ask to see proof of vaccination on the other. His polls have gone down and it is a while until 2022, much less 2024.

If DeSantis’s star fizzles, a crowded field of candidates are jockeying to take his place. In the Senate, there’s 41-year-old Josh Hawley of Missouri, who voted against certifying the 2020 election and cheered the January 6 insurrectionists with a fist pump. Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, the GOP’s leading China hawk, is another name that gets bandied about. According to a source, Cruz has privately told people that he has the best shot at the 2024 nomination because he would have defeated Trump if former Ohio governor John Kasich hadn’t stayed in the 2020 primary. Cruz didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In 2016, Trump’s stump speeches, for all their racism and misogyny, also contained crude proposals to limit immigration and protect domestic manufacturing with tariffs. But today the Republican base is animated by a mood rather than any specific policies. “[MAGA] means strong borders. It means fight crime, don’t let people run around burning down our cities. It means many things,” Trump said. That’s why you see prospective 2024 candidates appealing to white voters’ sense of cultural victimhood by railing against things like expanded voting rights, cancel culture, and critical race theory. So instead of Trump’s “build the wall,” you get “stop the steal.” Instead of the threat of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, you get the menace of the 1619 Project.

DeSantis is a natural practitioner of outrage politics. “Let me be clear, there is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory,” he said in March. “Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” Hawley excels at manufactured grievance too. “The alliance of leftists and woke capitalists hopes to regulate the innermost thoughts of every American, from school age to retirement,” he wrote in the New York Post last January. “And they’ve trained enforcers of the woke orthodoxy to monitor dissent or misbehavior. A ‘Karen’ who cuts the wrong person off in traffic gets followed home on a livestream and shamed into crying for mercy as her license plate is broadcast to an online horde eager to hound her out of a job.”

The irony of the 2024 field is that the candidates working hardest to sell themselves to the base as embattled outsiders are in fact the ultimate insiders. DeSantis, Hawley, Cotton, and Cruz each hold double Ivy League degrees and serve or have served in Washington. Pompeo graduated number one in his class at West Point and attended Harvard Law School before becoming a congressman, CIA director, and secretary of state. Trump may have inherited his wealth and attended the University of Pennsylvania, but he could credibly argue he wasn’t a politician.

Don’t rule out Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence may endorse Pompeo rather than run himself. Pence has surely gotten the message both from the polls and from the boos and hisses in public places that he’s not going to get the nomination. Whether DeSantis is legitimately the front runner and stays there or whether his star is on the wane and Pompeo merely is touting him as the front runner to annoy Trump remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen if Trump would offer DeSantis the second spot on the ticket. It is virtually assured that it won’t go to Pence again, although, credibly, it might go to Nikki Haley or Kristi Noem. Time will tell.