Many GOP insiders fear the Teflon Don is back

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If those people are still in the race come January, it will be 2016 all over again, and Trump will win, said Jason Osborne, the New Hampshire House majority leader who endorsed DeSantis in the primary, in a Rockingham GOP dinner this week where Nikki Haley served as keynote speaker. That’s it.

Even though DeSantis raised an eye-watering $8.2 million in his first 24 hours, the main field is growing again. South Carolina Sen. entered the race last week. Tim Scott. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, former Vice President Mike Pence and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu are making their own possible bids.

It certainly looks like 2016 will repeat itself, said Jason Roe, who was a senior adviser to Marco Rubios 2016 presidential campaign.

For Trump, the swelling field is the latest dose of good luck for a politician who for years has played by the rules no other candidate has. He seems to have been inoculated from blowback to scandals both major and minor that threaten to fatally injure almost anyone else. The GOP scored his own pair of fraud and lackluster announcement speeches in 2016 and again in 2022 on a curve that didn’t apply to DeSantis’ shambolic Twitter launch last week. As Trump skated, DeSantis’ launch threatened to become a metaphor for his campaign.

Before that, Trump funded an indictment for paying hush money to a porn star, while DeSantis was criticized for glancing and cautiously criticizing Trump’s actions, saying he didn’t know what was going on. paying hush money to a porn star to hush up some sort of alleged affair.

While Trump gave Tucker Carlson a Russia-sympathetic answer on Ukraine, DeSantis got endless flack for doing the same for calling it just a territorial conflict. Even this week, Trump golfed at his own club as part of a tournament there paid for by a Saudi-funded tour. He received no major criticism for doing so from any GOPers.

Trump is a unique force in American politics, because people don’t look at him as a typical politician, said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Marco Rubios’ 2016 and Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential campaigns. seems to be held to different standards.

He also benefits as the race contours with a growing field of competitors threatening to split the non-Trump vote.

For those of us who look at Donald Trump as an existential threat, it’s kind of tearing our hair out at this idea of ​​a crowded field and a repeat of the same dynamic in 2016, said Sarah Longwell, the Republican political strategist, and publisher of Bulwark, which is critical of Trump and the MAGA movement.

It’s not like the candidates running, for the most part, are knocking off Trump, either. DeSantis barely mentioned Trump during his campaign launch, but in recent days has drawn some distinctions with the former president. But instead of the field of fighters barging in against Trump, most barely touched him and more often than not, aimed their shots at DeSantis.

In the hours before DeSantis announced his campaign, Haley and her campaign doubled down on criticism of the Florida governor who first released a video devoted to portraying DeSantis as a Trump impersonator, and Haley in an interview on Fox that day was making nasty comments himself. about DeSantis copying Trump.

Scott, in a sit-down with NBC after his campaign launch event, deflected when asked about the Trumps’ behavior on Jan. 6, 2021. Not so when asked about DeSantis, with Scott seeking a difference in attitude and messaging. Vivek Ramaswamy went even further, actively defending and praising Trump while attacking DeSantis, to the point where some operatives questioned whether he was part of the former presidents operation, a theory Ramaswamy flatly denies. Only Pence challenged Trump this week on his proposed social security changes, telling the Des Moines Registers editorial bid that my former running mate’s policy is the same as Joe Biden’s.

Every person who joins the race helps Donald Trump become the focal point of the race, said Gregg Keller, a Missouri-based Republican strategist. You would think the water would be muddy in fact, it is the exact opposite. It’s more focused on him, to the point where he’s beating up these people, attacking these people, stealing the limelight the way he wants from these people.

Trump will try to match that show-stealing in Iowa this week, scheduled to bracket DeSantis’ Iowa launch on Tuesday and statewide events the following day with his own visit to the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale and a Fox News town hall.

Joe Walsh, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who unsuccessfully ran against Trump in the 2020 primary, said how DeSantis’ early performance on the national stage opened up for Republicans competing to be the primary field of the new No.

He was an unlovable son of a bitch. He was not well dressed, Walsh said. So if the field would have been Trump and DeSantis, actually, four or five months ago, now you’ve got all these other people who are coming in or just coming in because they see the same thing. They all bet. , well, fuck this. Ill be the Trump alternative.

It is possible for the field to shrink in size before its size shapes the outcome. Ultimately, the race will come down not to how many are running now, said Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota who ran in the 2012 Republican presidential primary, but how fast the field is narrowing.

The danger for Trump-critical Republicans is if too many of them stick around for too long.

The size of the field, if they’re all on the ballot when voting starts, will be a problem if you want to pick a nominee other than Trump, said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist who worked on George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. Losing 1 to 2 percent in 10 different people adds it up.

They have all the incentive in the world to run, after all and little reason not to, even if a large field, in the end, hurts them all.

You can have 15 or 20 guys, because there’s no cost and no downside, right? said Steve Bannon, the firebrand former Trump adviser. Its only potential upside. If you miss your roll, you get seven or eight or nine percent [support] and all of a sudden, I get POLITICO doing exclusives with me. Look at Mike Pence, he has 5 percent support and he has a town hall that Asa Hutchinson is at zero percent and every Sunday morning, on the once sacred ground of broadcast media, the Sunday shows, he’s on a different Sunday shows every week.

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