“Former President Donald Trump is rejecting pleas from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to postpone a campaign-style rally this weekend some 200 miles from the Miami suburb where an international search-and-rescue mission is excavating bodies from the site of a collapsed seaside condominium. DeSantis’s office has ‘made a direct plea’ to the former president’s team, calling on it to postpone the Saturday event in Sarasota. One Florida Republican bluntly said Trump and his team need to ‘read the room.’ The governor is getting tested here as to how far he’s going to be pushed before he breaks ranks with President Trump. And he has to be very careful because this is Trump country,’ this source said. ‘The base loves the president. But they equally love Ron. It’s a showdown going on right now.’ For now, the Trump camp is holding firm. ‘Nobody wants to cancel,’ a source close to Trump said” reports the ultra-right wing Washington Examiner.
The MAGA-Kremlinology questions of this report are interesting, as it seems maximized to make Trump look as bad as possible. Is DeSantis trying to preen and stir shit with Trump though a reliably right wing birdcage paper, or are the Examiner stirring this up themselves for some other actor who wants Trump knocked off? Or both? While I don’t know much about the Examiner’s owner Phil Anschutz, from what I can tell he seems to be much closer to the McConnell axis of the GOP than the Trump one, as he’s been active with the party a lot longer than the Donald, and as such a guy who would at this point be gravitating more towards Ron than Don for 2024.
More strange is the alleged reason for this pissing contest. There’s a lot wrong with Trump, pretty much everything. There’s a lot wrong with him still holding these fucking rallies after he already lost. But what’s wrong with holding it in Sarasota, 200 miles away from Surfside, and a city with its own resources for securing the rally and managing traffic? With a few thousand people at most showing up? I fail to see what makes it more egregious than any other Trump rally could’ve been. It’s not like Trump is having it across the street. And the Marlins played a four game homestand against the Nationals – in the same county – in the days since the collapse. As far as I can tell DeSantis did not pressure them to postpone or move the games to DC. It just looks stupid with all that considered.
It’s obvious this story was contrived by someone to create a pretext to make Trump look bad relative to DeSantis no matter what happens. If Trump relents, then DeSantis has a win. If Trump doesn’t, then DeSantis still gets a “win”, but not really. Who exactly set it up matters less than why they think they think this is the battleground where DeSantis eventually wins the war. It’s not, because Trump is almost certain to continue as planned and just make DeSantis look like a jackass for having brought it up in the first place. This is not a strong hand for DeSantis’s minions to play.