The early months of 2023 have exposed a central challenge for DeSantis. He needs to stitch together an unwieldy ideological coalition bridging both anti-Trump Republicans and Trump supporters who are considering turning the page on the past president.
President of the United States from 2017 to 2021
Allies have abandoned him. Tales of his icy interpersonal touch have spread. Donors have groused. And a legislative session in Tallahassee designed to burnish his conservative credentials has instead coincided with a drop in the polls. “I was in the DeSantis camp,” said Andrew Sabin, a metals magnate who gave the Florida governor $50,000 last year. “But he started opening his mouth, and a lot of big donors said his views aren’t tolerable.” He specifically cited abortion and Ukraine.
A turning point this year for Trump was his Manhattan indictment, which DeSantis waffled on responding to as the GOP base rallied to Trump’s defense. In late 2022, the thinking was that a decision on 2024 could wait, and Trump’s midterm hangover would linger. DeSantis published a book — “I was, you know, kind of a hot commodity,” he said of writing it — that became a bestseller. And DeSantis was on the offensive, tweaking Trump with a February donor retreat held only miles from Mar-a-Lago that drew Trump contributors.
His team has portrayed DeSantis as socially inept, and a pro-Trump super PAC distributed a video — dubbed “Pudding Fingers” — playing off news articles about DeSantis’ uncouth eating habits. This strategy served DeSantis well in Florida. But avoiding sit-down interviews with skeptical journalists has left him out of practice as he prepares for the most intense scrutiny of his career.
In a written response, DeSantis characterized Russia’s invasion as a “territorial dispute.” Republican hawks and some of DeSantis’ top donors were troubled. In public, the governor soon cleaned up his statement to say Russia had not had “a right” to invade. In private, DeSantis tried to calm supporters by noting that his statement had not taken a position against aid to Ukraine.
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