Trump v DeSantis: Who will be true Maga king after midterm results?

Battle royal set between ex-president and former protege, writes Andrew Buncombe

There is no longer any affection between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis (Getty Images)

It was not so many news cycles ago that Ron DeSantis was the clear understudy in Trumpworld.

Who can forget the sickeningly obnoxious adverts he ran four years ago when he first ran for governor of Florida, showing him and his children pretending to build a play wall on the US southern border?

That was the price of getting Trump’s endorsement for a race he he ended up winning, but only narrowly.

“Thank you to the people of Florida for your faith, your support and the trust you have placed in me,” DeSantis said, being sure to also thank Trump by name, saying he was particularly grateful for his support “when it wasn’t necessarily the smart thing to do”.

That was then, and this is now.

DeSantis, 44, is the incumbent governor of Florida, with an approval rating of 53 per cent, and who went into his battle for re-election against Democrat Charlie Crist with a lead of more than 11 points.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press needed little time after polls closed to call the race for for DeSantis.

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He raised more than $200m for his re-election campaign. If Crist had won it would have been the upset of the night.

But it was DeSantis who won, easily securing a second term and in doing so sending reverberations through Republican circles that will have surely been felt at Mar-a-Lago, home of the 76-year-old former president who must be wondering if his time is up.

Trump has been hinting for some time that he is going to announce a second bid for the White House.

In the final days of the election, the former president told a crowd in Iowa that he would “very, very, very probably do it again” in 2024. There were subsequent reports that a formal announcement could be made on 14 November.

On a rally in Ohio on election eve, there was speculation Trump would announce his run and dominate the news cycle. In the end, he chose not to, saying he would be “making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida”.

“The rallies [that Trump appears at] aren’t rallies for the candidates, they’re all about Trump,” Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, tells The Independent.

“So if you show up, you have a problem. If you don’t show up, you have a big problem.”

He adds: “As DeSantis’s popularity has grown in the party, Trump clearly feels DeSantis is not paying due deference.”

Two clear indications of how Trump may feel threatened by the younger, Yale-educated DeSantis emerged this week. On Saturday he tested a mean-spirted nickname for the Florida governor – “Ron DeSanctimonious” – the kind of thing he did when he felt threatened by “Crooked Hillary” Clinton, “Little Marco” Rubio and “Lying Ted” Cruz.

And on Tuesday – the same day he case his vote in Floriday for his one-time acolyte – he went even further, issuing a dark threat to DeSantis over what would happen to him if he did run for the White House in 2024 and even mentioning the governor’s wife.

Speaking to Fox Trump said that it would be a “mistake” for DeSantis to run.

“I don’t know if he is running. I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly. I really believe he could hurt himself badly. I think he would be making a mistake, I think the base would not like it – I don’t think it would be good for the party.

“I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering – I know more about him than anybody – other than, perhaps, his wife.”

Christina Greer, a professor of politics at Fordham University, says she will be watching carefully to see if Trump and DeSantis “quickly cannibalise one another in the worst ways as they seek the Republican nomination”.

“We know Donald Trump does not really care about the Republican Party as an institution, since we’ve seen him go after Republicans,” she says.

Casey DeSantis, Ron DeSantis’s wife, at a campaign event in Hialeah, Florida (REUTERS)

“He’s the leader of the Republicans in many ways, but a lot of Republicans internally say they prefer DeSantis because they say he has the Trump ideas without the baggage.”

On Sunday, Trump had appeared to tone down any criticism of DeSantis, officially endorsing him for his re-election bid. During a rally in Miami for Marco Rubio, who was running for a third term against Democrat Val Demings he said: “You’re going to re-elect the wonderful, the great friend of mine Marco Rubio to the United States Senate and you are going to re-elect Ron DeSantis as your governor.”

Todd Belt a professor of political science at George Washington University, says that when DeSantis refused in his debate with Crist to commit to serve a full second term if elected, it underscored the widely held belief he plans to run for the presidency.

“The question is, is Trump going to stand in his way? Obviously Trump has said some disparaging things about him. There’s a little bit of tension between these two and I don’t know if DeSantis will follow through and run if Trump was going to announce,” he says.

“Donald Trump is just such a huge figure in the Republican Party, and he can command a voting base, a volunteer base and a fundraising base that Ron Ron DeSantis at this point in his career just cannot match.”

In recent weeks DeSantis has been trying to secure more of a national profile, with incidents – condemned as “political stunts” by critics – such as flying asylum seekers from Texas to Democratic neighbourhoods such as Martha’s Vineyard.

While Republican elites and Fox News may like DeSantis it is unclear whether he has developed sufficient individual appeal among Trump’s base to secure enough support for a win in any primary showdown, says Yascha Mounk, of Johns Hopkins University.

“This is when the rubber hits the road,” says Mounk, a political scientist known for his work on the rise of populism.

“DeSantis has been very aggressive in fighting the culture war and lots of Republican elites may like him, it is unclear if he has yet developed enough of a visceral connection with the rank and file.