What Ron DeSantis Needs to Learn from Chris Christie
The former New Jersey governor was more style than substance...but that style is something the Florida governor and last hope of 2024 could desperately use.
On Wednesday, the political world gave a collective shrug to the news that former New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie was dropping out of a presidential primary he was only ever in on a technical level. The former Trump friend and surrogate had made his candidacy almost entirely about Donald’s awfulness, something reflected in his dropout announcement, which implored voters not to renominate The Failure yet neglected to endorse an alternative:
Donald Trump wants you to be angry every day because he’s angry. He wants you to be angry so that you’ll relate to his anger and then to vote for him. Please understand this. I have known him well for 22 years – more than anybody else in this race has known him. And I can promise you this. If you put him back behind the desk in the Oval Office and the choice comes and the decision is needed to be made as to whether he puts himself first or he puts you first, how much more evidence do you need that he will pick himself?
And if that is what we have there, then people are gonna remain angry, remain divided, and become even more exhausted than they are today. The country that I think we should choose is the country that recognizes that our differences have always been our strength, not a weakness, not something to divide us and anger us, but our differences have been our strength. We come from different countries at different times to different places with different skills, with different religions.
This passage is almost Christie’s entire problem in miniature. It’s platitudes about anger and division and differences—instead of the real problems with Trump—because those are what preoccupy the establishment Republican mindset with which Christie is afflicted. The refreshing candor with which he waged war against the teachers’ unions as governor briefly made him a conservative star a decade ago and temporarily got formerly-solid conservative firebrands like Ann Coulter to anoint him the Right’s savior, but it ultimately proved to be another case of style and one well-chosen issue over substance.
At the end of the day, Christie was squishy on environmentalism, gun control, illegal immigration, and same-sex marriage (and has recently pivoted to full liberal on the last one), and during his latest run adopted the bright idea that pro-lifers aren’t compassionate enough for the born and came out against laws to forbid genital mutilation of children by psychotic parents and exploitative doctors. And he couldn’t help but parrot MSM lies about Ron DeSantis supposedly approving education material that defended slavery.
Given that record, it’s for the best that Christie didn’t endorse DeSantis, which in theory would have been the right thing to do but in practice would needlessly get his Swamp stench on the only real alternative to Trump we’ve got. Yet for all Christie’s defects, he also had a gift for rhetorical directness and force that has been sorely lacking in most of DeSantis’s critiques of his primary opponent.
Consider the following sampling:
On Trump’s use of campaign contributions for legal defense: “I don't think they're well aware because he's lied to them as typical for Donald Trump [...] People are giving to him and because they think it's going to help him get reelected president when all he's doing is grifting off these people. He is a con artist, who is conning them out of their money, pretending he wants to be their president. Well, what he wants is a free ride for the legal defense he's getting for the criminal charges he personally faces."
On Trump’s avoidance of debates: “Well look he’s a coward. And he’s always been a coward in this race. He doesn’t want to defend his record [...] And you know, if I were under four indictments in four different jurisdictions and out on bail in four jurisdictions, I wouldn’t want to get on a stage and answer questions about how in God’s name you’re going to be able to represent this party and be able to take on Joe Biden.”
On Trump’s document woes: "Does anybody in America believe this? When you think about how many days of golf he's played since he left office, maybe he could have skipped a couple of rounds of golf and gone through the boxes to respond to a subpoena from a grand jury [...] The problem for Donald Trump in all of this is his own conduct. He's his own worst enemy. None of this would have happened to him or to the country, if he had just returned the documents."
On Trump’s character: “He's unwilling to take responsibility for any of the mistakes that were made. Any of the faults that he has. And any of the things that he's done. And that is not leadership, everybody; that is a failure of leadership [...] Beware, everybody, of a leader who never makes mistakes. Beware of a leader who has no faults. Beware of a leader who says that when something goes wrong, it's everybody else's fault.”
On Trump’s odds of throwing another winnable election to Joe Biden: “This guy is going to be sitting in a court room starting on March 4 for probably six to eight weeks depending upon the length of the defense case, but at least six weeks, every day. Not on the campaign trail making the case against Joe Biden, which is what Republicans should be doing every day. We simply cannot expect that someone who is facing this number of criminal trials, and quite frankly the conduct that underlies those charges, can be a viable fall election candidate against Joe Biden. And if we lose to Joe Biden, Republicans need to understand that we’re going to be looking at a packed Supreme Court, we’re going to be looking at the end of the filibuster, and a number of other issues that folks like me and the rest of the folks in our party can’t have [...] This trial date for Donald Trump just makes it clearer that he cannot be our nominee. If he is, we’re going to lose the election.”
And there’s a lot more where those came from.
Ron DeSantis is hands-down the best conservative officeholder and potential president since Ronald Reagan, and there’s not a close second. Substantively, he is everything we need to save America and everything the entire professional conservative class has claimed to want all throughout their careers. But political campaigning has been a different story. There is simply no getting around the fact that Ron DeSantis has never spoken this strongly or this clearly about Donald Trump—not about his character, not about his competence, and not about his electoral toxicity. Has DeSantis brought up Trump’s habit of scamming donors at all?
Yes, DeSantis has a sampler of broken Trump promises he keeps reiterating. He’s slammed Trump strongly on individual instances as they’ve happened. I just credited him for reminding an audience about Trump selling out pro-lifers. He’s chided Trump for “juvenile insults” (albeit while alarmingly suggesting “that helps me” as if conservative media doesn’t cover for Trump and reachable voters are magically going to see Trump’s juvenility on their own). He’s reminded people that Trump’s a big fat hypocrite on removing political opponents from ballots. And he’s called out MAGA’s demand for blind Trump sycophancy, and touched on things like Trump’s electability.
But contrast Christie’s clear presentation of that last point above with how DeSantis has:
If the election is a referendum on Joe Biden’s policies and the failures that we’ve seen and we are presenting a positive vision for the future, we will win the presidency and we will have a chance to turn the country around. If, on the other hand, the election is not about Jan. 20, 2025, but Jan. 6, 2021, or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it’s a referendum on that, we are going to lose.
Same basic point, same conclusion. But Christie’s was much more concrete in how it would impact the election, and added the practical realities of what losing means for those listening at home, which made it much more real. DeSantis, by contrast, presented it in much more vague rhetoric of what the election is “about” and taking care to avoid implying whether Trump did anything wrong.
Or compare their comments on Trump skipping the debates. Christie simply comes out and calls the man a coward; DeSantis has a true-but-much-milder spiel about “ow[ing] it to the voters to come and make the case” (occasionally spiced up with jabs about “keyboard warriors”).
Indeed, in Wednesday night’s two-person debate that Fox helped Trump distract from, DeSantis specifically avoided a question about Trump’s character, instead repeating a dry recitation of Trump’s key policy failures before pivoting to an entertaining-but-ultimately-irrelevant attack on Nikki Haley for her lying and liberalism. But by God, he’ll swipe at “presidents that have lost the zip on their fastball”! Wow, fiery stuff.
From the start, the DeSantis campaign’s Trump-related messaging has glaringly avoided sounding too harsh on Trump—whether out of misplaced fear of alienating Trump-sympathetic voters (who aren’t reachable anyway if they can’t handle the truth about the man), some Beltway consultant-class aversion to being perceived as “going negative,” or the personal sensibilities of the candidate himself, I don’t know.
But whatever the source, it hasn’t been working. Ron and his team should have realized long ago that he wasn’t going to get hard Trump supporters no matter what they said or did, while soft Trump supporters were never going to be roused out of their griftercon-media-induced haze by rhetoric that doesn’t grab attention, provoke coverage, or apply any degree of discomfort to the choice to keep supporting Trump. I believe that these, when combined with their failure to account for the extent to which conservative media is conditioning voters to support Trump and covering up reasons not to, are the central reasons why DeSantis’s campaign dropped in the polls almost from Day 1.
Chris Christie is an unprincipled, moderate self-promoter who ultimately never left the mark he could have made on American history. But the no-nonsense communication style that once made him seem like something more should have had every single conservative in America taking notes. Here’s hoping that, if the impending Iowa caucuses don’t prove the polls completely wrong, it isn’t too late for Ron DeSantis to finally see the importance of frank talk and unvarnished indignation when dealing with a pack of thugs who threaten to lead America to destruction.