“Is Ron DeSantis running for president?” seems like a strange question for a potential POTUS who polls second — and sometimes first — with Republican primary voters against Donald Trump. It’s stranger still when you realize that the real question is whether Ron DeSantis is running for president without running for president.
To give you an idea of what I mean, watch the “Freedom Is Worth Fighting For” video his non-campaign released on Sunday.
My Townhall colleague Guy Benson nailed the vibe: “An announcement video without the actual announcement.”
DeSantis also sat down with Mark Levin on Fox News Sunday night. You can watch part of the hour-long interview here if you like, but the important thing to take away isn’t anything the Florida governor said to Levin. “Someone definitely coached him to smile more,” PJ Media’s own Paula Bolyard noted on our company Slack channel. “The fact that he’s smiling more tells me he’s very serious about running.”
Sometimes it’s the small tells that say so much. Sometimes it’s the big tells.
DeSantis isn’t traveling to early presidential primary states like Iowa or New Hamphire, at least not yet. Instead, his most recent tour was through three struggling Deep Blue cities to tout what he’s done differently in Florida.
Last Monday, DeSantis spoke to Chicago cops at an invitation-only event to remind them about his recruiting efforts in a state that hasn’t defunded the police. “If you come and you’re qualified from another state and join any of our agencies — city, county, state sworn law enforcement — you get a $5,000 signing bonus immediately, right off the top.” Speaking more broadly — with comments aimed squarely at voters worried about the two-year crime spike — DeSantis also said, “You’re not going to have a good economy if the streets aren’t safe. You’re not going to have a good education if people don’t feel safe.”
DeSantis is calmly but quite publicly holding up his state as a model for the nation, just like a governor running for president would do. Except that he has yet to announce that he’s running. He hasn’t even formed one of those exploratory committees that allows a not-yet candidate to fundraise.
But he is meeting with potential donors, over a hundred of them this weekend, just four miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago retreat. Some in attendance were described today by CBS News as “longtime supporters of former President Donald Trump.”
Later this week, DeSantis will be conspicuous by his absence from CPAC, the premier conservative convention, held again this year in the Washington, D.C., area. Two actual presidential candidates, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, will be speaking there. Also speaking is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, widely believed to be preparing for a presidential run of his own. This year’s CPAC keynote speaker is, once again, Donald Trump, who is probably the reason for DeSantis’s non-campaign for president.
Trump is famous — his 2016 GOP rivals might say “infamous” — for his bull-in-the-china-shop method of primary campaigning. None of his ’16 opponents could figure out a way to counter Trump’s gleefully choatic approach. Maybe DeSantis is trying something new, a kind of political jujitsu of being where and what your opponent is not.
Assuming DeSantis really will run against Trump, will his jujitsu work? Um… ask me again when the primaries are over. Predictions are hard, the wise man once said, especially about the future.
I’m not privy to when or how DeSantis will officially kick off his campaign, or even whether he’s actually decided to run in 2024. But I do know this much: when he does make it official, the track will have been well-prepared in advance and he won’t stumble out of the gate.
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