Ron DeSantis and the failure of pseudo-Trumpism Republican voters want the real thing

Donald Trump was not the first candidate to seize this national-populist mantle in the US. In 1992, thanks to his economic nationalism, Ross Perot won more votes than any third-party contender for the White House since former president Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Populist candidates for the Republican presidential nomination such as Patrick Buchanan, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have also sounded national-populist themes, only to have their campaigns starved of funds by the party’s libertarian and globalist donor elite.

Trump was unique in that his wealth, along with small donor contributions, allowed him to personally fund much of his successful campaign to win the nomination in 2016, in spite of a big donor boycott. In the election that followed, he won because he appealed to national-populist voters, particularly in the deindustrialised swing states of the Midwest. He added their support to the existing Republican base of economic libertarians and evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics.

In different ways, DeSantis’s Pseudo-Trumpism and Nikki Haley’s Pre-Trumpism are attempts to build bridges between these raucous MAGA newcomers and the remnants of the older Bush Republican party — at least those who had not already quit the party out of disgust with the populist parvenus who have crashed the country club.

DeSantis, when he launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, looked like he might be able to bring together the different factions of the post-2016 Republican party. During the Sixties and Seventies, Richard Nixon managed to be acceptable both to the Goldwater-Reagan Right wing of the party and the moderate, business-backed “Rockefeller Republicans”.  In the same way, DeSantis sought to be “Trumpy” on immigration and culture-war issues, while implicitly signalling to traditional Republicans that he would not be as heretical as Trump on economics and foreign policy.

And on immigration at least, DeSantis successfully made the issue his own, by, among other things, signing into law a Florida statute mandating background checks by employers to discourage illegal immigrant employment (like many “far-Right” national populist proposals, this was a policy supported by many pro-labour Democrats as recently at the Nineties). In the culture war, too, DeSantis out-Trumped Trump. But DeSantis’s battle against the Walt Disney Company, which supported controversial sex education and gender policies, ultimately backfired by making him look more-than-a-little-ridiculous for waging a quixotic battle against the House of Mouse.

While DeSantis and his strategists were misled into thinking that America’s culture wars matter as much to Republican voters as they do to Republican pundits, Trump proved otherwise. In March last year, he attacked DeSantis for supporting cuts to the type of entitlement programmes cherished by national-populist voters when the Florida Governor was merely a conventional Republican representative in Congress. “People are finding out that Ron wanted to destroy Social Security and raise its minimum wage to 70, and he fought very hard to do it,” Trump declared. “He also had very strong plans for cutting Medicare and still does.”

This was a powerful argument: 79% of the public oppose Social Security benefit cuts and 67% oppose raising Medicare premiums. Among Republicans alone, nearly half — 42% — favour raising taxes on households that earn over $400,000 a year to cutting benefits, compared with only 37% who disagree with the idea. DeSantis weakly tried to fight back by repudiating his own former positions and by pointing out that Trump once said benefit cuts might be considered in the future — but the blows didn’t land.

As this suggests, however incoherent Trump may sometimes be, he has tapped into a worldview with certain coherent public policy positions, whether they be on government entitlements, immigration or forever wars. Members of the declining Republican establishment who hope that they can revive their old Bush-era programme of benefits cuts and foreign adventures, while pacifying national populist voters with performative denunciations of wokeness, will be disappointed by DeSantis’s failure. If there’s a conclusion to be drawn from his rise and fall, it’s that Trump voters want the real thing, not a placebo.

And for the same reason, if Pseudo-Trumpism is this month’s loser, then next month’s will surely be Trump’s remaining challenger. For who is Nikki Haley but the pre-Trumpist tasked with putting the old band of Bush-era libertarians, neoconservatives and corporate globalists back together? As much as they despise it, Trumpism is supported by a sizeable minority of the electorate. And even once he exits the political stage, the taste for national populism he has inspired is unlikely to disappear.