Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has treaded cautiously around Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary, careful not to suggest that Trump’s mounting legal troubles or his loss in 2020 make him the wrong choice for the GOP nomination.
But in a local radio interview Tuesday, DeSantis came closer than ever to suggesting that Trump, the GOP front-runner despite all his baggage, shouldn’t have joined the 2024 race.
“Well, look, I never thought he should run to begin with, even before all these legal cases when he left office in January of 2021,” DeSantis told veteran Boston journalist Dan Rea on WBZ NewsRadio.
Rhea asked DeSantis whether he thought it would be better “for his party and his country” if Trump stepped aside.
“I think he did a lot of good things, and I give him credit for that,” DeSantis said. “But I never thought it was a good idea for him to run again, because, one, I think we need a candidate who’s going to be able to win a clear-cut victory; two, we need a candidate that’s actually going to be able to deliver on all the things that we’ve been talking about, [and] that requires focus and discipline.”
His remarks come days after Trump’s fourth indictment — this time in Georgia, for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election there.
DeSantis rarely takes the bait on the former president, instead leaving that to his campaign’s rapid response arm or the Never Back Down super PAC supporting his candidacy. But as he reboots his campaign and prepares for the first Republican debate set for next week, DeSantis may need to confront Trump in a less subtle way if he wants to remain in the race.
A recent memo suggests, however, that’s the opposite of what DeSantis is being advised to do Wednesday in Milwaukee.
The memo, posted online by a consulting firm advising Never Back Down, recommends that DeSantis defend Trump while attacking his other rivals — despite a trove of other documents from the firm showing DeSantis stuck in a distant second place against the field’s polling leader.
“Trump isn’t here so let’s just leave him alone,” Axiom Strategies advised DeSantis to say at the debate, which Trump has suggested he won’t attend. ”He’s too weak to defend himself here. We’re all running against him.”
The memo directs DeSantis instead to go after his other closest rival, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Still, DeSantis has slowly been amping up his criticisms of Trump, stating unequivocally that Trump lost the 2020 election and calling his insults “phony” and “juvenile” at a recent New Hampshire town hall. Asked in Iowa about Trump’s one-sided feud with the state’s Republican governor, DeSantis bashed the former president by name: “I think Donald Trump’s attacks on Kim Reynolds are totally out of bounds,” he said.
The DeSantis campaign hasn’t responded to HuffPost’s requests for comment about the radio interview or the Axiom Strategies memo.
Most GOP presidential hopefuls are united in their unwillingness to poke Trump and anger his passionate base, when none of them has yet broken out as a viable Trump alternative. Of the candidates willing to antagonize Trump — former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — only Christie has qualified for the Republican debate stage, suggesting little appetite in the party right now for anyone but Trump.