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DeSantis' 2024 strategy: dominate the internet
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Is Ron DeSantis too online?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 presidential bid this week on a Twitter Spaces event hosted by its terminally online CEO Elon Musk. Amid dropping poll numbers and headline after headline criticizing his unfriendly nature, DeSantis’s decision to launch his campaign on Twitter raises an important question: is the Florida Governor too online?
Twitter has been an important hub for conservatives for years and has become more so since Musk bought the platform and became its CEO. DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter instead of somewhere that caters to a more traditional media audience reflects the platform’s importance for conservatives and, perhaps more importantly, allows DeSantis to bypass the media and have more control over his announcement.
DeSantis, who last year was seen as the most credible challenger to former President Donald Trump within the GOP, has been described as standoffish, socially awkward, and even rude by colleagues from his time in the House of Representatives and the Florida governor’s mansion. Charisma is typically an indispensable quality for most people running for office, but DeSantis seems to be a rare example of an elected official who does not connect with people, and for the most part doesn’t even really seem to try.
Former president Donald Trump ripped DeSantis for needing a “personality transplant,” which he reminded readers are not medically available, which maybe helps explain why so much of the hype for DeSantis has come directly out of the internet, where human contact is less important. Trump himself is perhaps the most online person to ever hold public office. His reinstated Twitter account, which he does not even use, still has nearly 87 million followers despite his two-year ban.
Trump has maintained a unique ability to make his online statements matter offline, using the relatively new communication tool to steer national media better than anyone in history. Even the limited reach of his Truth Social account with its 5 million followers can still drive news cycles and provide him a platform for fundraising that DeSantis and other politicians would kill for.
This is a formidable challenge for DeSantis to overcome. Can the Florida governor out post the ultimate poster with his own brand of liberal trolling and conservative red meat? His two Twitter accounts (one personal, one governmental) have only a fraction of Trump’s following. He posts less than other prominent Republicans like Texas Governor Greg Abbott and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and his posts don’t have Trump’s attention-grabbing magic that induce both rage and glee across the political spectrum.
Biden vs. Trump redux: what we know so far
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A couple of obvious points to begin with US elections. One, of course, they take far too long. Two, they cost far too much money. Three, we are so, so tired of both of those facts because they are such a distraction from being able to get policy done for almost 50% of the entire electoral calendar. Having said all of that, this is a particularly unfortunate upcoming election because we have two candidates that very few people are enthusiastic about. It's Biden versus Trump redux. That's not absolutely certain yet, but you would bet on it. And a couple of points that I think are a little less obvious.
First, whether or not Biden should run again. Everyone is saying, "Oh my God. Can't we get somebody else? He's 80 years old, he's going to be 82 if he wins. That's too old for anyone to be a CEO. Why would we be putting that person in a job that has such incredible importance globally?" And I get it. I absolutely get it. I think it's too old for the position. I'd rather have younger people running. But if you are interested in running the candidate that's most likely to win, do you go with an incumbent president or do you go with somebody else having no idea who that someone else is? And the answer seems to me is reasonably likely you go with the incumbent president. There are huge benefits in the US political system in running as an incumbent. If Biden decides he isn't going to run, Kamala Harris, who is much more unpopular than he is and certainly much more untested, and to the extent that she's tested, she's much more unproven than Biden, would be a weaker candidate, I think almost everyone would agree, than Biden would.
I do think there are better candidates out there. Gretchen Whitmer, for example, the governor of Michigan, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado. There are others that I don't consider as effective, but nonetheless would be strong candidates like Governor Gavin Newsom of California. There are plenty of others, Gina Raimondo, for example, the secretary of commerce, it would be a pretty wide group, but would they be more effective and more likely to win if they aren't the incumbent president? And there, I think the answer is no, especially because the incumbent president isn't going to be doing a lot of campaigning for whoever that person is, and Biden is not up for that kind of a schedule, intense schedule, whether he's running or it's somebody else. I'm sympathetic to the view that even though Biden has capacity to be present until he is 86, is a serious concern that he might well be the most effective person for the Democrats to run. And especially running a relatively uncontested campaign. When you're running against Kennedy and Williamson, you're basically running an uncontested campaign.
Now, I also think that those people who say that Biden is incoherent and incompetent, that's performative, that's partisan, that is certainly not anyone who has spent time with Biden in conversation as president. I have, many, many people I know have, whether you're talking about members of cabinet or senators or other heads of state, Biden's ability, his mental coherence and cogency to handle the basics of the job and the importance of those meetings and decisions has not, in my view, substantially eroded over the last couple of years. I also do think, though, that there's a real question mark. He has lost a step or two, certainly physically in the last 10 years, and I do worry that this could be an issue over the course of his presidency. So if Biden becomes president a second time and he's going to run with Kamala again, is there a real likelihood that Kamala Harris becomes president? Of course, there is, and that's something that I think is going to be a concern for a lot of certainly independent voters.
Then on the Republican side, Trump is not a slam dunk, but at this point, he's at least a layup. He's a jumper from the free-throw line. He's likely to get the nomination. In part, he's likely because he's running a relatively smarter campaign, he's trying hard to lock up key endorsements early that will crowd out others like DeSantis maybe from even deciding that they're going to run, but certainly makes it more of an uphill struggle. He's raising a lot of money. He's spending that money already in targeted advertisements to go after, to kneecap those that would be potentially the stronger folks in the race.
I think it's likely that he is the nominee. I think he's too old. Though he strikes me as much more physically robust than Biden, I think his unfitness is primarily not about his age, though it's a concern. His unfitness has to do with everything else about the quality of his person, his lack of ethics and morals, and of course, what we have seen from his first term in governance and not his administration, but how he personally has acted in that office. Something that I think would be a concern to a greater degree if he runs again. Now, a lot of people I hear saying, "Well, if Trump gets the presidency again, then he's going to have no one good around him because they will refuse to work with him, and it'll be a completely incompetent administration." I think that's precisely wrong. I think once Trump gets the nomination, almost all of the GOP will line up behind him.
I think Nikki Haley, it's very clear that her run is an effort to become Trump's VP, and if she gets that, she's one of the most capable and competent Republicans out there through when she was governor, when she was UN ambassador. There's no question about that. And do I think that she would be effective as a VP? Frankly, more so than Pence. I think Pompeo would still be there. I think that a shocking number of GOP members, maybe not Chris Christie, maybe not Asa Hutchinson, certainly not Liz Cheney, not Mitt Romney, but the strong majority of Republicans would support Trump, and they would even be willing if they got the right position to join the administration. The bigger danger, I think, is that a Trump administration, having been through four years, will know what they need to do to have much more impact in what they want to get done, not just in terms of policy, which is generally less problematic, but in terms of eroding democracy.
For example, really hollowing out civil service in a lot of administrations that they think are stopping them from doing things they want to do. The brittleness of US institutions after another four years of a Trump administration, I think, would be a lot greater than they were after the first four, where his impact on those institutions as a whole was relatively limited.
What happens? Damned if I know. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I think I have a strong view of who's going to actually win the election. I think we're far off from that. I saw the Washington Post poll like everyone else did, that shows that right now, Trump is actually leading Biden head-to-head. It's the first major poll that showed that. Before, most have showed that Biden would win head-to-head against Trump. I think part of it has to do with how Biden holds up from a health perspective. Part of it has to do with how well the economy looks. Part of it has to do with how Trump is able to campaign. And we've got a long, long way to go with a lot of moving parts and also some fairly substantial global crises that we and others are dealing with on the global stage before people go to the ballot box on November in 2024.
Having said that, a lot of people are going to get really exhausted by this campaign, and I'm sorry for everyone, but we are at the beginning of it, and it's a long slog, and I'll be talking you through. So everyone, be good. I'll talk to you soon. Bye
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Indictment boosts Trump GOP standing and strengthens Democrats
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics:
Former President Trump has been indicted. Now what?
This week, a jury in Manhattan indicted for former President Trump for allegations related to hush money payments that he made during his presidential campaign to a woman that he allegedly had an affair with. And the question is: what's next? So there's probably two major political fallout implications from this action. The first is that every other Republican in the country, including those running against Donald Trump in the presidential primary, are going to likely take Trump's line, that this is a political persecution, and it's being done by a hostile progressive prosecutor in Manhattan who's against him. And there's no way that Trump can get a fair trial. This probably helps Trump standing inside the Republican Party and could be a major tailwind to push him over the finish line in the Republican nomination.
The second implication is that this is probably pretty good for Democrats. If Trump wins the nomination, then there's going to be a lot of centrist voters and even moderate Republicans who have a hard time holding their nose and voting for him in the 2024 presidential cycle. And if he loses the nomination, then we have this hardcore group of Trump supporters who are fundamentally disaffected by the party and may not show up to vote for him, which could help Biden in his reelection no matter how bad the economy is. Either way, the next 18 to 24 months of this campaign cycle are going to be dominated by this and potentially several other criminal prosecutions against a former president. An unprecedented action in US history.
"Defund the FBI" is the new "stop the steal"
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and want to spend just a couple of moments on the FBI heading into Mar-a-Lago, the resident of former President Trump just yesterday. Absolutely unprecedented news, something we haven't seen before in US history. Trump came out and immediately said, "Nothing like this has happened against a President before." And that is true. He is a unique President in many ways, and that has seen unique consequences, both in terms of the events of January 6th and two impeachments that succeeded in the House and then failed to convict. All of that is unprecedented.
Impeachment has become truly failed as a political mechanism. That is also new in the United States. And now we have the FBI heading into his home and taking boxes and boxes of classified documents out of the safe. Now, legally, we don't have much real information yet, and we probably won't for some time. We don't know what's in the safe. We don't know exactly what the case is that is being argued. We do know the Department of Justice would've had to make a strong argument to get a judge to approve a warrant as opposed to just going for a subpoena for the information. And I'm no lawyer and I have no idea to judge the merits of the case that the judge him or herself would've had to make that decision on so we're going to have to wait to make a reasonable and useful judgment there.
And those political figures that are coming out immediately in saying it's a witch hunt and it's weaponization of the FBI when, by the way, the head of the FBI today, Christopher Wray, was appointed by Trump and nobody has quit over these investigations, and there have been no leaks that have suggested they are in any way untoward. All of that is partisan BS. It's not credible. It's just point scoring. So if that's a legal side where everything seems to be above board and legit, we have no basis to make judgements about the case itself at this point. Politically, it's a very different matter. Politically, of course, we are going to see two very different worldviews where those that are supporters of Trump will be incredibly strongly opposed and view this as a witch hunt and view the FBI and the DOJ as partisan and directly acting on the orders of President Biden, again, despite the fact that there's no credible information that yet in any way points to that.
But I do think that politically, this is going to strengthen Trump in the Republican Party, strengthen with his base, and also strengthen those leaders of the Republican Party, his support from them who really don't want him to be the next nominee, but are stuck with him at this point. Let's keep in mind, it's the opposite of what had been happening over the last few months with fewer people showing up at his rallies, with less media attention, with January 6th and the hearings going on in the House and Fox and others deciding not to even cover them and not really talking about them. The narrative was on one side politically with the Democratic Party and the very few never-Trumpers among Republican leadership. And now you have this need for everyone on the Republican Party to rally behind and around Trump and say, "This is a witch hunt and this is unacceptable."
And that's just as true for Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader in the House as it is for Ron DeSantis, who clearly does not want Trump to be the nominee. DeSantis wants to be the nominee, but he now has to say, "This is unacceptable and we need to support Trump." And he's in an impossible position for him, but going after Trump in this environment if you're a Republican is tantamount to being a traitor to your party. So I do think that at least over the course of the next few months as this plays out the ability of Trump to drive a stronger drumbeat to get more people out to support him and out to fight the fight against the Democrats and against Biden and against the FBI and against the rule of law and the institutions in the United States that Trump says is broken. I mean, in many ways, every much the argument that he made with "Stop the Steal," despite there being absolutely no credible evidence that the election was stolen, he now has a new lease on that argument.
"Stop the Steal" was getting old. People didn't want to re-litigate and rehash that unless you were a die-hard Trump loyalist, but now you have the FBI and the DOJ going into Mar-a-Lago and creating this case against the former president. And that's going to be seen as an absolutely equivalent to "the election's fake" and it's going to bring up all of the "Biden should be in prison" and "Hillary should be in prison". And that's what this is all about. It's just partisan, the Democrats going after the former president irrespective. Now, I think it should go without saying that none of this today, none of it could happen in any other advanced industrial democracy in the world. It's conceivable that we would see this in Japan, or Germany, or Canada, Australia, or France, and that is precisely because the United States and its political process, its election system, and the checks and balances by both the legislature and the judiciary on the executive has become massively eroded.
And the perception of the legitimacy of those institutions among the media, which has become almost completely partisan, and among the population, which has been consumed by that media on one side or the other, is far, far greater than we could see in another wealthy democracy. And that goes to show that the US as a democracy really isn't the same as these other countries anymore. It was 30 years ago, 20 years ago. It's not anymore. And that's a challenge, that's a challenge for the Americans to be able to get allies to pay attention and to be aligned and to coordinate. And it's also a problem in the Americans being effective in preventing rogue states and rogue organizations from taking actions globally that undermine the United States and undermine former US led global order. The US is still the most powerful country in the world, but politically it really doesn't have the strength, the ability to lead by example, the values that it's had historically.
My view on all of this is I absolutely want the former president to be indicted if the DOJ believes that he has broken the law. And I would say that about any other former president as well. I certainly do not believe nor have I seen anything credible that implies that Biden has broken the law the way that there are many such instances of Trump. I do believe that "Hunter Biden" should be investigated. I've said it before. I think that the role he's had, not just in Ukraine, but in China, where he was traveling on Air Force Two and using his connections, his relationship with the then vice president to make money out of China absolutely does not pass the ethics test and deserves a full investigation. I felt the same way about Ivanka and all the licenses that she was getting from China while holding an official position in the White House and the daughter of the president at that point of the United States.
I see those things as very equivalent and very problematic, and they should be investigated, but we're not talking about those things. We're talking about the former president of the United States, and I think that's more important. And, frankly, I personally hold that to a higher standard. And so if we have a legal and judicial process that believes that there have been high crimes committed, then absolutely I do not want that former president to be seen as above the law. And my concern is that it's not just about the perception of American legal and judicial institutions having eroded, and they have. It's also the desire for the former president to be above the law that is driving a large number of people that know better to say that this is politicized, that this is not an appropriate following of legal and judicial process, and, that of course, is doing a lot more damage to American democracy.
I expect that there will be violence as a consequence of this. I expect that this will make the upcoming midterm elections uglier and more de-legitimized. And it certainly concerns me a great deal as we get closer to 2024.
So that's what I think about all of this and I hope everyone is getting in a little R&R in the middle of August. No rest for the wicked. And, of course, August never as quiet, quite as you want it to be. Talk to you all real soon.
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Trump's 2024 outlook: more vulnerable after Jan 6 hearings
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Happy Monday. And a Quick Take for you to get your week started off. Wanted to talk a little bit about a topic I haven't discussed very much and that is the implications of the January 6th commission and where we are heading for US elections.
It's pretty clear to me that Trump is still the most popular in the Republican Party. And if you want to make a bet, you would certainly still say that he gets the nomination. I think it's virtually a hundred percent that he's going to announce his candidacy. Closest people around him certainly believe that in relatively short order. But he is more vulnerable than he was just a few months ago. And some of this is obvious. I mean, he's not president anymore and so he doesn't have the platform that he had when he was president. Of course, he's going to lose a significant amount of attention, impact as a consequence of that. He's been banned from Twitter. He's banned from Facebook. And his new Truth Social is not doing very much to speak of, at least to date. Doesn't seem to have any real management. And a couple times I've taken a look at it, doesn't seem to have a lot going on in terms of the space. He's not attracting the same crowds he used to when he gives speeches.
Now, the January 6th committee, which has been an anti-Trump effort... There's no question that the decision by Kevin McCarthy to pull those that he had appointed to serve on it and make sure that it was basically only Republicans that were strongly anti-Trump, in this case, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, would participate, meant that it was going to be perceived as a more partisan affair than it would have if there had been full participation from across the political spectrum. No question about that. But it has still had impact. And I think one of the reasons it's had impact is because so many of the people that have participated are hardly Democrats. And in fact, many of them are people that were strong pro-Trump characters until January 6th; a bunch of former staffers, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, the deputy national security advisor, someone I know pretty well, actually, Matt Pottinger, members of Pence's team, others. I mean, these were all people that had been strongly loyal to Trump for the entirety of his first term.
Now, I want to be clear, the rank and file of the Republican party still think that this whole thing is a nothing burger. There's only a small minority of the Republican party that believed on January 6th that he was responsible for it in any way. And that number has basically not moved. It's within a margin of error. But independents have shifted against Trump. And by the way, so has Rupert Murdoch. And I think it's very interesting that over the last few days, you see opinion editorials from the editorial board, from both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal saying that Trump is unfit to run again for the presidency, shouldn't be president in 2025. These are press outfits that were all in for Trump in 2020 and they're not anymore.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is an elite newspaper. It has a lot of Democrat and establishment Republican readers, few that would be considered ultra-MAGA. That's not true of the New York Post. Though, of course, New York itself is a heavily blue voting urban area, but they're going to lose a lot of subscribers in Staten Island, certainly on the basis of taking that perspective. But even Fox News itself... I mean, you watch Hannity, you watch Tucker Carlson, they're a hundred percent still for Trump. But the daily coverage that you see that has been much more straight up news over the last couple of years has also covered a lot more. They haven't been covering the January 6th commission, but they have not been promoting Trump and they've not been trying in any way to whitewash him or actively cheerlead for him in a way that Newsmax, for example, has consistently no matter what time of the day that you watch it.
So I think at the very least we can now say that we're going to have a lot of alternative candidates for 2024. I think it's increasingly likely that Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, is going to run against Trump. I think there will be a number of others as well. Again, you wouldn't bet against him at this point, but you wouldn't think it's going to be easy. And I think that's important. By the way, that's of course also true of Biden in the sense that Biden is at his most unpopular of his entire presidency right now. He's polling in the mid to high thirties. He's got big problems, particularly with the economy, particularly with inflation. He's vulnerable on COVID issues as well. And he also is looking increasingly slow, and his age is a factor, by the way, as is Trump's. And that fact is something that's going to make a lot of people much more interested in having anyone but Biden run in 2024 in the Democratic side and anyone but Trump run on the Republican side.
But this matters more about Trump because frankly, if you get Biden or if you get someone else, there's not a lot of impact in terms of the ultimate trajectory of US political institutions, the role of democracy, the kind of policies that you get in the way that the United States is perceived globally, where if it's Trump vis-à-vis another more mainstream Republican, it matters a lot, precisely because of Trump's unfitness, his willingness to call elections illegitimate and do everything he can to undermine them, certainly something you'd expect to do again, as well as his indifference to rule of law. So I do believe the fact that both Trump and Biden are increasingly vulnerable to significant challenges is a much greater impact and import when you look at the Republican side. Now, again, if you make me bet right now, I would still say that Trump gets the nomination and that it's close to a conflict for 2024. But again, overall, the likelihood Trump becomes president a second term has gone down significantly.
Now, one danger I'd like to raise. I really think we need to call out those Democrats that are spending money and channeling money in a number of races to try to get pro-Trump stop the steal election deniers to win in Republican primaries, because they believe that those pro-Trump candidates are going to be easier to defeat in a general election. Now, first of all, a lot of Democrats felt that way about Trump himself in 2020 and look what happened as a consequence, but I'll go further than that. This is a very dangerous game they're playing, and they should stop.
One more Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the House is too many. One is too many. It leads to violence. It leads to lunacy. It leads to disinformation. She's a self-avowed Christian nationalist. She's doing everything she can from a weak position to try to undermine the American political system and the values that it's built upon. And if you end up with five or 10 of them in the House, a couple of them in the Senate, a couple of them as governors, you do a lot more to deeply undermine the structural integrity and stability of the American political system. So the Democrats should stop playing that game right away.
Finally, I want to make a shout-out to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, two people on the Republican Party. Kinzinger voted for Trump, was full-throated about it. Cheney votes with Trump over 90% of the time in the House. They have basically given up their political careers. Liz Cheney lost her role in the leadership of the House and is almost certainly going to lose her upcoming race for re-election. Kinzinger has already had to step down. In both cases, these are people that are standing by democracy and rule of law in the country above their narrow political preference. There are not many people in the country that are leading by example right now. And if by doing it, that means you have to lose your job, well, they're showing us what a leader really is and I tip my cap to them. That's it for me. I'll talk to you soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
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