DeSantis is doing great and that's a problem in Trump's GOP

All of this would be hard enough to navigate were it not for the elephant in the room: Donald Trump. DeSantis doesn’t just have to share a party with him, he has to share a state with him, which makes it dramatically harder to avoid either looking like Trump’s puppet or clashing over turf. Either extreme could be politically fatal. And what happens if DeSantis is actually able to shine in spite of all that? “If you start to become the guy who is the obvious frontrunner,” Never Trump conservative Sarah Longwell asked on the Bulwark podcast, “is that a good thing?” That is, “Are you being groomed as Trump’s vice president when he runs again in 2024—or should you hire someone to taste your food, because the more popular you get, the more Trump decides he wants to go after you?”... At any point, DeSantis’s ambitions could be crushed on a whim by a capricious Donald Trump. Sometimes it’s best to fly under the radar. DeSantis is doing the opposite, and he might be personified by the proverb that says, “The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.”