RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/06/its-beginning-to-feel-a-lot-like-2016-again/

The post It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like 2016 Again appeared first on New York Times.

Around the time that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, there was a lot of chatter about how anti-Trump Republicans were poised to repeat the failures of 2016, by declining to take on Trump directly and letting him walk unscathed to the nomination.

This take seemed wrong in two ways. First, unlike in 2016, anti-Trump Republicans had a singular, popular alternative in Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose polling was competitive with Trump’s and way ahead of any other rival. Second, unlike in 2016, most Republican primary voters have now supported Trump in two national elections, making them poor targets for sweeping broadsides against his unfitness for the presidency.

Combine those two realities, and the anti-Trump path seemed clear enough: Unite behind DeSantis early, run on Trump fatigue, and hope for the slow fade rather than the dramatic knockout.

But I will admit, watching DeSantis sag in the primary polls — and watching the Republican and media reaction to that sag — has triggered flashbacks to the 2016 race. Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the underlying dynamics that made Trump the nominee are still in play.

Let’s count off a few of them. First, there’s the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. This is my colleague Nate Cohn’s main point in his assessment of DeSantis’s recent struggles, and it’s a good one: DeSantis has spent the year to date accumulating legislative victories that match up with official right-wing orthodoxy, but we already saw in Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign the limits of ideological correctness. There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of conservative positions in their heads, but not enough to overcome the appeal of the Trump persona, and a campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/team-desantis-were-about-action-not-beltway-chatter

There’s no doubt Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has fallen far behind former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican nomination polls. In the last days of February, Trump had a 12.8 percentage point lead over DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, with all the other Republican challengers and likely challengers way, way back. Now, Trump’s lead over DeSantis is 29.2 points, with all the other GOP candidates still farther behind. DeSantis is actually closer to the bottom of the field than he is to Trump.

That has led to a lot of criticism of the DeSantis campaign and talk that they’re just not up to the job. “The DeSantis people are rookies,” one veteran of New Hampshire Republican politics, Fergus Cullen, told Politico recently. Reams have been written about DeSantis himself not being particularly skilled at the kind of schmoozing and glad-handing required of presidential candidates dealing with the public and donors alike.

The loudest critical voice, of course, comes from Trump, whose ratings have soared amid a politicized indictment in New York and a politicized rape lawsuit in New York. Trump has used the increased support to launch a relentless series of attacks on DeSantis. The latest comes this week from top Trump campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who released a memo titled “DeSantis is Burning Through Cash Just to Slide Further In the Polls.”

LaCivita and Wiles accuse the DeSantis campaign of wasting millions of dollars on ineffective advertising to “fill the vacuum of leadership the governor left in Florida while campaigning (horribly) overseas in Europe.” Doing so amounts to defrauding donors, the Trump team says: “What you are witnessing is a fleecing on an epic scale. Tens of millions of donor dollars spent, while poll numbers … drop.”

Such concern trolling is obviously an irritant for the DeSantis camp. But they have a simple response: While Trump is campaigning (and fighting off legal actions), DeSantis is … governing. And DeSantis is governing in a distinctly conservative way, a way that embeds conservative principles in the laws of the nation’s third-largest state.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/03/vivek-ramaswamys-vision-is-america-first-even-more-than-trump/

While Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are busy tearing chunks out of each other, there is an unlikely sleeper candidate in the Republican race who is quietly winning hearts and awakening hope across the country with his sunny version of America First.

Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, the woke-busting entrepreneur, son of Indian immigrants from Ohio and the GOP’s first millennial presidential candidate, is rising steadily in opinion polls, just 10 weeks after announcing his candidacy on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. 

In one CBS poll this week, he managed to tie with former VP Mike Pence in third place among likely Republican voters, ahead of establishment figures such as Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott and Asa Hutchinson.

He’s pitching himself as a more energetic but less divisive version of Trump, as “the outsider that doesn’t just talk about draining the swamp,” he said in New Hampshire this week. “I’m going to get the job done . . . I see an opportunity to do in 2020 what Ron­ald Reagan did in 1980, win a landslide election.”

He preaches that it is not enough merely to point out the hypocrisies of the left’s “secular religions” of “racial wokeism, gender ideology and the climate cult.”

These are just symptoms of a national identity crisis, he says, caused by turning away from the founding values of the country, from success by merit and adherence to the rule of law, values that wooed immigrants like his Indian engineer father and psychiatrist mother to Ohio.

“Faith, patriotism, hard work, family, these things have disappeared,” he says, and he wants to “fill that void with a vision of American national identity that dilutes this woke poison.”