At the beginning of this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis looked set to be a serious challenger to Donald Trump's ambitions for another run for the White House. A development that gave me some hope for American politics.
Don't get me wrong: I have zero sympathies for either of these two, but a choice of the Republicans for DeSantis would likely lead to the same reaction Donald Trump shows at any loss: denial. It's not hard to imagine Trump creating another story that his eager fans will swallow without double-checking the facts: "The Republican nomination was stolen."
A logical next step would be an independent run of Trump for the White House. It would be the Democrats' dream scenario, with Republican votes split over two opposing camps.
But recently, a loss for Trump within his party has become far less likely. The more contenders join the race for the Republican nomination, the less likely it becomes that anyone else than Trump may win. Mathematics often favors the leading contender when the number of other candidates increases; it worked for Trump in 2016 and seems no different now.
And in this case, it is worse. Although the polls show different outcomes, the numbers are now that Trump has about twice the number of supporters that DeSantis has, and DeSantis has twice the number of supporters than most other candidates.
That puts the well-funded Florida Governor between a hard place and a rock; Trump enjoys ridiculing "Ron DeSanctimonious" (helped by Musk's latest Twitter disaster when launching the Florida Governor's campaign), while practically all other contenders aim their arrows at DeSantis, thus leaving Trump on seemingly unchallenged higher ground.
No moral higher ground
I'm not talking about moral higher ground; there isn't any on that side of the aisle. And there certainly isn't any for a twice-impeached president who declared he could declassify classified documents "even by thinking about it." Yet, interestingly, he staged a "dress rehearsal" to practice hiding those presidentially declassified documents from the FBI. I could easily fill the rest of this page, or a book, with stories like this, but many others have already described the fire and fury of the Teflon Don.
It surprises me that Trump's sympathies for Putin and refusal to criticize his invasion of Ukraine don't seem to hurt his reputation. In contrast, DeSantis was sharply criticized for calling the war a "territorial conflict."
It's just as surprising that so many blue-collar voters see him as one of them; he's a privileged millionaire's son who has never done a day of manual work in his life. Nor can I remember any example when he showed empathy for the poorer people in American society whose votes he relies on to get back in power.
The view from Europe
Perhaps there is a difference for outsiders looking in, in this case, for Europeans looking at the United States. Once, it was the other way around. In the 1930s, Americans ignored the risk of Hitler's rise to power in Germany partly because it was hard to imagine a threat from such a complete loser, a corporal in the Great War whose life story was an endless list of failures, who even failed in his version of January 6th in Munich, and who looked like Charlie Chaplin.
Writing this from the other side of the Atlantic, the same feeling is present all around me in Europe. We wonder why anyone would vote for this man who seems to wear a bulletproof vest, protecting him from each of the many exploding scandals that would force any American politician to throw the towel in the ring.
It even seems that each new scandal only strengthens his invincibility. This image was recently further strengthened and may have convinced some voters still sitting on the fence when they watched unsuspiciously CNNs "town hall," where he could ridicule the guilty verdict of the day before to loud applause and laughter from the audience.
It will not have convinced any well-read Democrat. However, an undecided group of voters, mid-field in the wasteland of polarized American politics, likely fell for his bombastic confidence after what should have been a knock-out blow for any politician anywhere in the world.
Add those potential cult members to the loyalty of his energized grassroots supporters, and you get the hard-to-understand situation that a candidate facing an unprecedented myriad of criminal investigations may well become the Republican's choice as the best man to lead the United States. And worse, he may even win from the voice of reason in the presidential election.
A planet in trouble
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