Many Republicans have tried to discern the source of Trump’s appeal and replicate it. As early as 2016, Ted Cruz was tacking to Trump’s right on abortion and guns, and Marco Rubio briefly tried to match Trump’s schoolyard insults, at one point making fun of the size of his hands. But Trump’s secret sauce with the base turned out to be his unwavering pugilism. Having spent more time than perhaps any other Republican candidate consuming conservative media, Trump had absorbed its message that conservative America is under assault by sinister liberal elites. He built a political style designed for the world depicted on Fox News, in which the Republican Party is always losing because its leaders are too weak to fight back.
Conservatives sum up his appeal with the phrase “But he fights.” As the “but” implies, they often acknowledge Trump’s flaws before praising his overriding instinct to attack their enemies. Even his errors can turn to his benefit. The more Trump draws howls of outrage from liberals and the media, the more he proves his tribal bona fides.
DeSantis has undertaken an almost clinical effort to manufacture and bottle this aspect of Trump’s style. He has repeated the Trumpian narrative that the party’s leaders have failed to take the fight to the enemy. “We cannot, we will not, go back to the days of the failed Republican Establishment of yesteryear,” he promised in 2021. DeSantis’s brand is, like Trump’s, a Republican who never compromises, never apologizes, and always fights — whether the issue is education, the pandemic, or even Trump’s misconduct. At the CPAC conference in his home state in February, he claimed that Democrats “want us to be second-class citizens” and assailed the “corrupt and dishonest legacy media.”
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