DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, in contrast, understood that the cruelty was the point. Both bet that voters wanted a candidate who sounded like Trump but was younger and more competent: They both leaned into the former president’s draconian anti-immigration record and made social issues, particularly regarding gender and sexuality, centerpieces of their campaign. The operative theory was that voters liked Trump’s policies: They wanted candidates who were scrappers but who, unlike the former president, wouldn’t get distracted with endless scandals and 2 a.m. social media barrages.
This was the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Trump theory of Republican politics: That you could, in the aggregate, recreate all or most of Trump’s appeal while sanding off his rough edges and, in doing so, build a winning campaign. In 2016, Trump’s opponents were caught on the back foot: They were rooted in an older version of politics. In 2023, he no longer had a monopoly on extremist rhetoric. Ramaswamy and DeSantis ran as people who had the vision and the competence to actually see Trump’s wildest authoritarian fantasies to fruition. Want to actually see Trumpism in action? Vote for them.
The problem here was twofold. For one, if voters wanted Trumpism they could get it from Trump himself. Why vote for an alternative when you could have the real thing? (It certainly didn’t help that, even in his diminished state, Trump remains a charismatic political force while DeSantis and Ramaswamy are at best off-putting weirdos.) The second problem was that they were emulating Trump. Much of the former president’s appeal comes from his apparent authenticity. While other candidates triangulate and imitate, Trump is off the cuff. It’s proof to his supporters that he doesn’t care about saying the right thing just to get elected. (That a spray-tanned, serial fraudster would become an avatar of authenticity is itself an indictment of Republican—and American—politics, but that’s the subject of another column.)