Former President Donald Trump's rivals are in the race at least partly because they think he is unfit to lead the party — and yet they can't bring themselves to say that out loud for fear of angering the people whose votes they need, wrote Benjy Sarlin for Semafor on Wednesday.
"Everyone knows the case for Ron DeSantis over Donald Trump in the Republican primary, for example. In fact, it’s the same case for almost every Republican running against Trump: They think he’s a dangerous incompetent who blew the last election for extremely obvious reasons and is now determined to blow the next one by spending half his waking hours whining about it," wrote Sarlin.
"But almost nobody in the race is willing to say this because that might make Trump supporters mad. Instead, they’re hoping voters will find their own message appealing and then reach the necessary conclusion about Trump on their own."
"The result is candidates showering praise on the person they’re trying to defeat while their feistier super PACs or on-background strategists occasionally complain he’s (gasp!) too mean to fellow Republicans, or a tad bit squishy on guns or COVID-19," said the report. "Versions of these arguments all failed in 2016 when Trump was weaker and mostly don’t touch on the core doubts Republicans have now."
Trump and his loyalists, by contrast, have no hesitation about going after his opponents' perceived weaknesses. As DeSantis goes to war against Disney, and Disney responded by inking contracts that strip his officials of the power to take over the Disney World complex, Trump's strategists have mocked him as being "out-negotiated by Mickey Mouse." And now a pro-Trump super PAC is cutting ads showing DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers while warning he would destroy Social Security.
This is exactly how Trump won 2016, Sarlin pointed out: "Trump showed up and just said the quiet part out loud: George W. Bush was a lousy president who left Republicans with Barack Obama in charge and the Iraq War was a stupid idea ... When people say Trump 'tells it like it is' despite being a serial liar, this is often what they mean. He’s sometimes credited with a savant-like ability to identify his opponents’ vulnerabilities, but much of this schtick is just repeating what pundits on cable are already saying about them rather than using some 'Inception'-style scheme to plant the same idea in voters’ subconscious with magic words."
Trump's rivals simply can't beat him with the old school playbook of subtle jabs, argued Sarlin — they aren't even directly criticizing him for getting indicted in New York over bookkeeping fraud to conceal a hush payment.
"Eventually, you have to say what it is you mean or voters start to wonder if you have anything to say at all," he wrote.
