1 year ago
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After rallying around Donald Trump following news of his indictment, Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals are mystified that he’s wiping the floor with them as he soaks up all the media coverage.
“It feels like fucking 2016,” one GOP strategist and supporter of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told Politico.
Sure does. Too afraid of their own shadow to take a stand, Republicans are once again caving to Trump. This time around, they’re on the glide path to handing the party’s nomination to a twice-impeached perennial loser whose sole concern now is trying to avoid jail time.
Unless you count DeSantis coming out of his bunker just long enough to make one mediocre stab at bashing Trump’s porn star hush money payments before immediately retreating for cover.
DeSantis’ comments did whip up a firestorm of coverage, but he just couldn’t take the heat. By the time the indictment dropped, DeSantis was doing backflips to disparage the charges as “un-American” and a “weaponization of the legal system” for political purposes.
On the day Trump was arraigned last week, DeSantis was literally doing puppy photo ops at a pet adoption event hosted by the Republican Party of Florida. But even puppies, face painting, and ice cream felt a little too dicey for the once-burned governor, whose team asked three reporters to leave the event lest another public relations flap overwhelm them.
But DeSantis wasn’t alone in being outshined by Trump’s run-in with the law.
