Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

The first primaries and caucus’ for the 2024 presidential election are just under a year away but Donald Trump is wasting no time going after who would be his strongest potential rival for the GOP nomination, the very popular and successful governor of Florida Ron DeSantis.

For the last couple of week’s both Donald Trump himself and Team Trump have thrown mud everything from claiming DeSantis was a big fan of lockdowns (he wasn’t) to claiming George Soros endorsed him (he didn’t). None of this is a surprise, Donald Trump has always fought like a Democrat against potential rivals/ You might recall he used similar tactics against Ted Cruz in the primaries and frankly went so far that I had to think long and hard before endorsing him before the GOP primary. You might also recall that there was a big fuss concerning Ted Cruz’s speech at the convention because of these tactics.

In the end Cruz ended up supporting him and when Trump, to a lot of people’s surprise and delight, turned into not only the most conservative but the most successful president of the 21st century we all cheered. It was however his failure to address the issue of voter fraud (something I warned him about five days after the 2016 election) that cost him him re-election in 2020.

Now comes another GOP primary and the Democrats who were happy to promote him in 2016 are again convinced that Trump is their best shot in 2024 to keep power after putting the country through two of the hardest years it’s faced when not fighting a world war (I don’t count Ukraine as US troops are not actively fighting on the ground). Furthermore as Demonstrated by their love affair with Mitt Romney they will never fail to promote the message of any member of the GOP who targets his own party.

So Trump has turned to attacking DeSantis and the Trump hating press/left have been happy to repeat these attacks (What? You thought Meta/Facebook/Instagram let Trump back in because they were scared of the GOP congress? Please!) and will continue to give him such a free reign as long as DeSantis who they fear, is in the crosshairs. Th consistant with DaTechGuy’s 1st Law of Media Outrag with states:

The level of Outrage or interest of the media and their allies on the left concerning any insult or prevarication concerning a person or thing will routinely be equal to the inverse of the degree of the political distance between said media / leftists and and the target of said insult or prevarication at the time it is made.

The question is however: “Does this help or hinder Donald Trump to get the GOP nomination?” In My Opinion it does not for several reasons:

• DeSantis has been visibly fighting the media/left since the day he was elected
• He has been public enemy #1 for the left, the woke and the groomers in the press
• He has managed very public victories such as the one over Disney advancing conservative cause.
• People keep pouring into his state fleeing from the blue states
• DeSantis who had won his first election by a squeaker won re-election by a landslide in a year when the rest of the GOP fizzled

and last but not least:

• Not only are these charges demonstrably false GOP partisans, even those who prefer Trump KNOW they are false

Even worse for Trump DeSantis has taken the exact right tactic to counter said attacks.

• Pointing to his work
• Hitting Joe Biden
• Declining to attack other republicans

Or to put it simply he’s not giving Trump’s attacks the time of day.

Now Donald Trump, despite his vigor is an old man and one thing that’s almost axiomatic is you aren’t going to get a man over 70 to change his nature. If in his gut he thinks this is the way to go it will take a lot of convincing to get him to change course.

All this adds up to a tactic that is not going anywhere nor is likely to go anywhere and even worse makes Trump vulnerable to a simple counter-attack that DeSantas hasn’t used yet, but that’s another post.