Call it Swamp War II: Trump Bungle-oo. Ron DeSantis has yet to declare an intent to run for president, but his current book tour certainly looks like a dry run. He’s hitting the electorally important states, selling them on the “Florida Blueprint,” and fighting the culture war with gusto every step of the way.

At the same time, DeSantis has taken care not to attack already-declared candidate Donald Trump … at least not directly. However, DeSantis has begun to attack key bureaucrats over policies and actions, and these bureaucrats have one thing in common. Trump either appointed, endorsed, or refused to fire them, a point the Miami Herald notices too:

In press conferences and speeches across the country, Florida’s Republican governor has begun to single out Powell — often by name — for criticism, arguing he has wreaked havoc on the economy and shown favoritism to wealthy investors.

“This Fed chairman has been a total and complete disaster,” DeSantis said last week in suburban Atlanta, speaking as part of a nationwide book tour. “And you are paying for it, and people all across this country are paying for it.”

The criticism is part of a broader message from the governor, who has positioned himself as a forceful critic of even ostensibly non-partisan government officials who he says are part of an unaccountable bureaucracy in Washington.

In other words, DeSantis has declared war on “the swamp,” just as Trump did. But Trump nominated Jerome Powell for Fed chair in November 2017, a year after Trump won office on a promise to “drain the swamp.” At the time, Powell had served on the Fed for five years, by which time CBS called him ‘the Republican Yellen,’ as Janet Yellen retired as chair after being appointed by Barack Obama. In fact, Trump reportedly considered nominating Yellen for another term, calling her preference for low interest rates “excellent,” and passed entirely on the consensus conservative choice of outsider John B. Taylor, a Stanford economist who wanted a more aggressive approach to interest rate hikes to reverse almost a decade of “quantitative easing” and Fed manipulation of the economy.

The misery of rapid rate hikes now makes the 2017 decision to forego a more rational withdrawing from the QEs look like a lost opportunity. In fairness, though, Powell provided exactly the policy Trump wanted, and the present misery in in response to the inflationary policies pushed by Joe Biden, and especially the anti-growth policies that begin in the traditional energy sectors. But that’s a distinction without a difference, because the Fed’s still stuck manipulating the economy in the vacuum of rational response from the Biden administration, and Powell’s not doing a good job of ensuring capital resiliency in his own actions.

That makes Powell a great proxy for DeSantis to attack Trump indirectly. He’s already following that strategy with another bete noire of the last three years, as the Herald notes:

It’s an approach that has led DeSantis to regularly attack Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, saying his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic did the country great harm. …

In a party whose voters are by and large still reluctant to embrace direct attacks against the former president, Republicans say, going after his personnel choices as president might be one of the few safe lines of attack DeSantis can pursue.

For now, yes. DeSantis hasn’t formally entered the race yet, so there’s no need to go after Trump directly at this point. But it’s clear what the argument will be when DeSantis gets into the race after the end of Florida’s legislative session. He will use Powell, Fauci, and a few others to argue that the swamp still has to be drained — and that Trump can’t be trusted to do it.

DeSantis, on the other hand, has already demonstrated this year alone that he can and will get rid of bureaucrats who refuse to do their jobs and follow the law. He’s already removed rogue prosecutor Andrew Warren from office for publicly pledging to ignore Florida’s statute on abortion, and he’s preparing to do the same to Monique Worrell for failing to properly prosecute a felon that went on to commit a triple murder. He has replaced board members in Academia with conservatives to push back against radical identity Marxism. His argument that the same will be possible in Washington, but only with a president willing to do the hard work to impose accountability — and that Trump spent four years failing to do so.

To make that case, DeSantis will have to make it directly at some point. Right now, though, he’s just laying the groundwork, courtesy of the proxies Trump himself provided in his term. And that point will arrive soon, which is why DeSantis and his team are laying the larger campaign groundwork already in impressive granularity:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ team is already plotting out a strategy to run against Donald Trump for the long haul. The plan focuses less on making a quick splash in places like Iowa or New Hampshire and more on outlasting the former president in a battle for Republican convention delegates.

Even though it’s early and DeSantis isn’t officially a candidate yet, in talks behind the scenes, an expanded map is viewed as one of the keys to victory, three sources close to the governor said.

“There have been multiple conversations about delegates and how they are picked in various states across the country,” a DeSantis adviser said. “One thing that we have looked at is that Trump can be beat on the delegate portion of all this. He has never been good at that.”

Trump’s organization in the 2015-16 cycle required multiple interventions on this point. His novelty and brilliant use of earned media overwhelmed the deficiencies, but in 2024, Trump is no longer novel and can’t depend on earned media any longer. He has plenty of cash this time, but a good part of that will go to legal fees rather than organization, and unlike in 2020, the RNC will remain separate and independent.

Organization matters, but so does the debate. DeSantis knows that well enough from two statewide elections in Florida as well as the wats against national media over the last year. The time for the real locking of horns is coming.