Trump is impulsive and follows his intuition while DeSantis is a thoughtful attorney who weighs the pros and cons before making a decision. Both share the strategy of polarizing opinion, but with a big difference: DeSantis has been much less provocative and exaggerated than the former Republican president.
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By Pierre Fesnien, RFI journalist
DeSantis, Trump’s main rival in the Republican camp, has built his political career riding the wave of Trumpism. It was thanks to the support of the former president that he was elected governor of Florida in 2018. But this closeness ceased after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential elections. This distance has been prudent, since he has avoided criticizing his mentor. Trump, on the other hand, does openly criticize his former dauphin: “(DeSantis) is ungrateful. I created him,” he would have told his advisers, according to reports from the Hington Post.
“DeSantis monopolizes the attention because he embodies the young Republican guard who wants to take everything down,” Françoise Coste, a historian, professor at the University of Toulouse 2, and a specialist in the American right and the Republican Party, told RFI.
Since before his election in November 2022, the idea of running for the Republican nomination had been on his mind. “One fact confirmed that this ambition was not unreasonable: the brilliant way in which he was re-elected, since he obtained an advantage of almost 20 points over his Democratic rival, which represents more than a million votes, in a key state like Florida” , points out Cost.
Less provocative and exaggerated than Trump
According to several polls, DeSantis is considered the winner in a head-to-head confrontation with Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. While he has embraced the Trump program in Florida, DeSantis also has other qualities that make him a very attractive candidate: young, Iraq war veteran, Yale and Harvard graduate. What counts most, however, is that he has been much less provocative and exaggerated than Trump.
On paper, everything or almost everything differentiates him from the former president. Trump is a billionaire and inherited the fortune from him, DeSantis comes from a middle-class family and is a descendant of Italian immigrants. Trump is impulsive and follows his intuition, DeSantis is a thoughtful lawyer who makes decisions after carefully considering the pros and cons. One is known for being a womanizer, the other presents himself as a family man with an orderly life, his wife Casey is his chief of staff and his closest advisor.
They are two radically opposed styles that, however, converge on one point: the way of doing politics. Like Trump, DeSantis focuses on polarizing issues to captivate his constituency, and once he has a target in his sights, he doesn’t let go. That is why, in October 2022, the Financial Times summed up the differences between the two men in a laconic sentence: “Ron DeSantis is Donald Trump with a brain.”
DeSantis’s program for the United States is part of the conservative policy that he carries out in his state at the national level, described as “ultra-conservative” by some. While she shares Trump’s skepticism toward science, DeSantis also has other very popular battles.
In the current context of culture war, the governor of Florida has embarked on a crusade against “wokism.” He spares no effort to restrict the right to abortion and expand the right to bear arms. One of his laws intended to prohibit talking about sexual orientation in elementary schools has generated a lot of controversy in the United States, and the opposition denounces that it is an indirect way of talking about homosexuality in class. Even the White House entered the debate with a pronouncement, putting DeSantis in the national spotlight. De Santis, like Trump, has a strong attraction to this type of political maneuvering.
Backed by his clear reelection in 2022, after narrowly winning in 2018, Ron DeSantis is convinced he has the winning formula with his show. He has vowed to turn his state into a laboratory of conservative think tanks, hoping it will propel him to the White House. “They still haven’t seen anything,” he declared on Tuesday, March 7, when presenting a new series of highly controversial measures for his state, with the air of a political program for the United States: a drastic reduction in access to abortion, relaxation of gun laws of fire, a crackdown on transgender youth and a clampdown on immigration.
The campaign issues are not much different from Trump’s, but the idea of them being promoted by a much less unpredictable and uncontrollable candidate like DeSantis could bring back many GOP supporters who have abandoned him. “There are a lot of establishment Republicans who would come home for DeSantis,” David Jolly, a former Republican member of Congress, confided to the Washington Post. DeSantis “has embraced the Trump program in Florida and has done similar things to Trump, but he’s really far removed from it,” he added.
Is De Santis a pale copy of the original? Because doing the same as Trump without being Trump is undoubtedly the main quality, but also the main defect of the governor. This may win him the support of a large section of the Republican Party, but it’s not clear if that will be enough to win over Trump’s earliest and most loyal supporters, who might have a hard time being swayed by a pale copy of the original.
