DeSantis walks tightrope as Trump, Jan. 6 legal woes loom over 2024 primary

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is grappling with how to handle the potential looming indictment in the federal Jan. 6 investigation against former President Trump, who continues to lead the 2024 primary.

DeSantis made headlines on Tuesday when he said Trump “should have come out more forcefully” on Jan. 6, 2021. However, in a subsequent CNN interview, DeSantis appeared to temper his comments, saying he hopes Trump does not get charged. 

“He certainly could have gone after Trump more forcefully,” said Doug Heye, a national GOP strategist. “Lord knows if Ron DeSantis were indicted for anything, Donald Trump wouldn’t take a 20,000-foot view of the American justice system. He would hammer Ron DeSantis all day every day.” 

The governor’s comments underscore the narrow tightrope his campaign is walking as he looks to gain traction with a base loyal to Trump. 

“This is an issue that truly animates the Republican base,” said Ford O’Connell, a Florida Republican strategist. “He’s trying to win a primary. In a lot of Republican voters’ minds, you cannot separate Trump from this issue.” 

This dynamic was evident on Tuesday morning, when Trump announced on Truth Social he received a target letter from the Justice Department on Sunday evening. Trump’s announcement came moments before DeSantis announced his military policy rollout at a press conference. The Florida governor was quickly met with questions about the legal development. 

“We want to be in a situation where you don’t have one side just constantly trying to put the other side in jail and that, unfortunately, is what we’re seeing now,” DeSantis said, prompting applause from the crowd. 

Of course, DeSantis was not the Republican presidential contender to tightrope walk around Trump’s legal news on Tuesday. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed what she called the “drama” surrounding Trump as a “distraction,” while Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence said the judgment over Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should be left up to the American people. 

Tuesday was a packed day for DeSantis and his campaign, which has been trying to break out of second place in the polls. The Florida governor began the day filing paperwork for next year’s South Carolina primary, the first major GOP presidential candidate to do so this cycle. Then, DeSantis rolled out his military policy rollout, which he used to highlight his identity as an Iraq War veteran. DeSantis later took part in a highly anticipated sit-down interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, his first this cycle with a major, non-right-leaning news outlet. 

But, DeSantis’s campaign swing — and the 2024 race in general — continues to be overshadowed by Trump and his legal woes, this time with news of the target letter.  

On top of that, Trump went on to further make headlines Tuesday with a Fox News town hall in Iowa, a state that is the first GOP presidential contest and one DeSantis has made a priority. 

“Whenever [Trump] wants to make sure he drowns someone out, he does it,” O’Connell said. “Trump and his team this go-around have Republican messaging and branding to some extent almost down to a science.”

However, some point out that DeSantis’s swing through South Carolina could be playing differently with voters on the ground in the state itself. 

“What they did [Tuesday] in South Carolina my sense is playing a little bit more prominently in South Carolina than it is in newsrooms in Washington and New York,” Heye said. 

Heye pointed to a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released this week that showed Trump down 5 percentage points from April and DeSantis up 1 point, 37 percent to 23 percent. 

“If you follow what we see and hear on cable news and so forth, ‘Well, the primary’s over and Donald Trump has already won it,’ but New Hampshire tells us that’s not true,” Heye said. “It’s one of the reasons there’s been this disregard for national polling.” 

Although it’s unclear how the former president will come out of his multiple legal issues, he has appeared to politically benefit from them in the Republican primary. In addition to his opponents having to react to the news, Trump has received free airtime in the media and raked in massive amounts of cash in fundraising on the news.

When the president faced federal charges in the classified documents case in Miami last month, he used the trip to the Florida city to meet with voters in the Little Havana neighborhood following his arraignment and then spoke to the media and met with donors later that same day at his property in Bedminster, N.J. 

This dynamic has left other Republican campaigns, particularly DeSantis’s, with the task of competing against these headlines. 

“You’re going to have to do a ton of more interviews like that,” O’Connell said, referring to DeSantis’s CNN interview. 

However, other Republicans say the onus of overcoming Trump’s airtime is not necessarily on DeSantis and the other campaigns, but rather on the news media. 

“Donald Trump is like oxygen to a flame for the media especially,” South Carolina-based GOP strategist Alex Stroman said. “If folks in the media want to talk about substantive issues and don’t want to talk about Trump, then they have to quit asking about Trump.” 

However, in an environment where a former president continues to make news when it comes to his unprecedented legal issues, Republican candidates have also been grappling with how to get above the noise. 

They can do that “by spending every waking moment in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina,” Stroman said. “And talking to voters, talking about issues that matter and not being distracted by any of the noise.” 

Stroman cited Haley and Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) campaign strategies in the face of the Trump-dominated news cycle. 

“[Haley] continues to keep her head down, focus on New Hampshire, focus on Iowa, focus to an extent on South Carolina,” he said. 

Scott, for his part, made political headlines yesterday when a super PAC supporting him announced a $40 million ad campaign across Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. 

“The biggest problem that DeSantis has right now is not that he’s losing ground on Trump, it’s that he’s losing ground on the rest of the field,” O’Connell said. “He has to establish himself firmly as the number two.”

And DeSantis will have a chance to at least increase his standing in the polls when he faces a national audience next month at the first Republican presidential primary debate. 

“In the debate, I think you’re going to see who is actually viable,” Stroman said. “Whether Donald Trump shows up, I think is insignificant. I think he should show up, but if he doesn’t, I think it will still give us a picture of what the future of the party looks like.”