Welcome to Email News: If his powers are dimmed, Trump will be the last to see it.

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January 31, 2023

Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose

Here we go again

Former US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on his plane on Saturday.

Many Republicans have long wanted Donald Trump to go away. But none of them have ever had the political power or the guts to make him.

This perennial reality that has loomed over the Republican Party ever since Trump's hostile takeover in 2016 is about to define another GOP nominating race. The ex-President was back out on the campaign trail on Saturday in early voting New Hampshire and South Carolina. And there was something rather jarring about seeing a twice-impeached ex-commander-in-chief who tried to steal the last presidential election on the stump as if nothing had happened.

Trump is sensitive to claims that his new presidential bid, launched with a dreary speech late last year, is a bust already. Yet New Hampshire's Republican governor Chris Sununu, a young, orthodox conservative who is mulling a presidential run himself, went on CNN on Sunday and declared Trump's address to party activists in the Granite state as boring.

By any normal rule of politics, Trump is a tarnished brand. After his victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, he's helped doom Republicans to poor results in national elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Many top Republicans believe there's no way Americans will return him to the White House in 2024. But Trump doesn't believe that. He clearly thinks he is owed the Republican nomination.

If his powers are dimmed, Trump will be the last to see it. Which means someone has to usher him off the Republican stage like an unwanted guest. Plenty of Republicans, including Jeb Bush, Marco, Rubio and Chris Christie tried this in 2016. But they got burned. A new battery of Republicans is spoiling for a shot at the party nomination, but are Trump's former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, his ex-Vice President Mike Pence, and his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo really going to knock Trump off his perch?

While Trump's currency with Republican bosses has faded, his fabled power base among grass roots voters has yet to be tested. But one man -- Ron DeSantis, who is currently waging a battle against what he calls the "far-left woke agenda" as governor of Florida -- is regarded by political pros as potentially positioned to take down Trump.

DeSantis, 44, has enacted a cultural agenda targeting transgender athletes, railing against Covid-19 precautions, the teaching of Black history in schools and abortion that eclipses anything Trump achieved nationally. The new rising star of Republican politics, he won reelection last year by nearly 20 points. But to win the GOP nomination, DeSantis risks alienating Trump's most fervent grassroots supporters.

Trump, a feral political animal, scents the danger. On Saturday he unleashed his effort to keep DeSantis out of the race, blasting him as "disloyal" for considering a run. (Trump seems to think the young pretender owes him forever for an endorsement in 2018 that helped him win the Sunshine state's GOP gubernatorial nomination).

Last year, Trump made a pretty lame effort to brand his potential rival with the nickname "Ron DeSanctimonious." But "Disloyal DeSantis" might resonate far better with the MAGA crowd.

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'It's not about loyalty, but to me it's always about loyalty'

Trump has always had a rather one-way view of loyalty -- demanding total fealty from others while swiftly throwing countless aides and allies overboard when they cease to be useful or disagree with his wildest schemes.

Trump is especially prickly about DeSantis, both because he thinks he made him as a politician and because he's obviously a potential threat. So DeSantis is getting the Trump loyalty test:

"When I hear he might run, I consider that very disloyal," the ex-president said in a supremely Trumpian quote on his plane on Saturday. "But it's not about loyalty – but to me it is, it's always about loyalty – but for a lot of people it's not about loyalty."

All aboard

"I wonder how in the Hell it's still standing," US President Joe Biden said Monday near the mouth of a 150-year-old tunnel in Baltimore, that will be replaced thanks to his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure program.

Biden is going on the road in the next few days to promote the new law, as he limbers up for his State of the Union address next Tuesday. He wants to get credit for becoming the first president in years to pass infrastructure reform -- and to show Americans what their tax dollars are doing as he girds for a massive showdown with Republicans determined to cut spending. Biden also seeks to build on some encouraging economic news and a growing sense that perhaps the long feared 2023 recession won't happen.

"The structure is deteriorating. The roof is leaking. The floor is sinking," Biden. He was referring to the tunnel again, not taking a metaphorical swipe at a deadlocked political system that struggles to get anything done.

Biden, who famously commuted between Washington and Wilmington, Delaware, for years as a senator, said he'd been through the tunnel a thousand times. He pledged that when it's fixed, trains will be able to speed through at 110 mph rather than the current 30 mph. He claims the project will also generate 30,000 jobs.

There will be more subterranean thrills on Tuesday when Biden travels to another tunnel -- under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Manhattan -- that is also about to get patched up.

His message? This is definitely not a presidency that is going off the rails.

Thanks for reading.

On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and senior PA officials to discuss Israeli-Palestinian relations. Pope Francis heads to the Democratic Republic of Congo.