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A glitch-plagued chat with Elon Musk, live on Twitter, is an unconventional way to launch a presidential campaign. But with the entry of Floridas governor, Ron DeSantis, the race for the Republican nomination is now properly under way. The first states will not vote until January. Primaries are hard to predict, because it is expensive to conduct enough high-quality polls of primary voters in the key states. But, with that disclaimer over, one candidate has a huge, perhaps insurmountable, lead: Donald Trump. Mr Trump thus has a real chance of becoming Americas next president. Betting markets put his odds of returning to the White House at one in three.

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If you decided to pay less attention to Mr Trump after he lost in 2020, to preserve your sanity, you may be wondering how this can be the case. Parties do not usually stick with losers. Mr Trump led the Republicans to defeats in the 2018 midterm and the 2020 presidential elections. After he encouraged his supporters to stop the steal, some of them broke into Congress, with the result that one police officer died of a stroke and four committed suicide. He has since been found liable for sexual assault, too. Would the Republican Party really nominate him again?

Yes, it probably would. In 2016 and in 2020 it made some sense to think of the Trump movement as a hostile takeover of the party. In 2023 it no longer does. He is the front-runner because a large proportion of Republicans really like him. His supporters have had their hands on the Republican National Committee for six years now. More than half of Republicans in the House of Representatives were elected for the first time since 2016, and therefore under Mr Trumps banner. Almost all of those House and Senate Republicans who refused to make their peace with him have stood down or retired. Of the ten House members who voted to impeach Mr Trump in January 2021, only two are still there. They are outnumbered in their own caucus by more than 100 to 1.

Mr Trumps campaign is also better organised than in either 2016 or 2020. Our analysis of the primaries shows how hard he will be to beat. He has a stunning lead: polling for The Economist by YouGov suggests Republican primary voters prefer Mr Trump to Mr DeSantis by 33 percentage points. He also has a big lead in endorsements from elected Republicans, which are usually a good predictor of what will happen. In 2016, the last time Mr Trump contested a primary, he won the early primaries with much less support than he has now.

There are still Republican voters who would like an alternativehis 58% poll share means that close to half of primary voters must be open to choosing someone else. Yet the difficulties of co-ordinating the opposition to Mr Trump are daunting. People close to the Trump campaign say privately that the more candidates who enter the primary, dividing the field, the better for their candidate. Some big donors are giving money to non-Trump candidates on the condition that they drop out after South Carolina, an early primary, if told to do so. The idea is to engineer unity around a single non-Trump candidate, just as establishment Democrats united around Joe Biden in 2020 to stop Bernie Sanders, a leftist. Backroom manoeuvring by party bigwigs is less likely to work against Mr Trump, however, for the simple reason that he is the Republican establishment.

The way the primary calendar and pending legal cases against Mr Trump intersect is nightmarish. His trial for falsifying records in New York will get under way shortly after Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states vote. Neither this case nor any of the other investigations he faces are likely to be resolved by the time the primaries are over. It is therefore possible that the candidate of one of the two great parties could be subject to criminal charges when he is on the ballot. America has had badly behaved presidents before. It has never had one who is also the defendant in a criminal trial.

You might think that, at this point, voters would abandon Mr Trump in large numbers. Maybe. But when, earlier this year, a jury found that he had sexually abused a woman 30 years ago, the verdict had no measurable effect on his poll numbers. Mr Trump, it turns out, is adept at persuading Republican voters that he is the real victim. Democrats, and plenty of Americas allies, think Mr Trump is a threat to democracy (as does this newspaper). His campaign is already turning this accusation back on the accuser: The 2024 election, a recent Trump campaign email announced, will determine whether we can keep our Republic or whether America has succumbed to the dark forces of tyranny. Those who accept that these are the stakes will probably overlook Mr Trumps innumerable and obvious flaws.

Imagine, then, that it is November 2024 and Mr Trump and President Biden are having a rematchthe first since Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson back in the 1950s. Could Mr Trump win?

The general election will surely be close. The electoral college gives Republicans a slight edge. The most recent landslide was 40 years ago. America has since become evenly divided politically and calcified because voters seldom switch sides. Mr Biden has some under-appreciated strengths, but he is no ones idea of formidable. Were the country to enter a recession, Mr Trumps chances would go up. Some mooted post-primary tactics intended to stop him, such as running a third-party candidate, smack of desperation: they could easily backfire and boost him further.

All of which means that you should take seriously the possibility that Americas next president will be someone who would divide the West and delight Vladimir Putin; who accepts the results of elections only if he wins; who calls the thugs who broke into the Capitol on January 6th 2021 martyrs and wants to pardon them; who has proposed defaulting on the national debt to spite Mr Biden; and who is under multiple investigations for breaking criminal law, to add to his civil-law rap sheet for sexual assault. Anyone who cares about America, about democracy, about conservatism or about decency should hope that Mr DeSantis or one of the other non-Trump Republican candidates can defy the odds and beat him.

Stay on top of American politics with Checks and Balance, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter, which examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. You can read other articles about the elections of 2024 and follow along as we track shifts in Joe Bidens approval rating.

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Donald Trump is very likely to be the Republican nominee - The Economist

It was only on Sunday evening that LIV Golf, the mens league awash in billions of dollars from Saudi Arabias sovereign wealth fund, met its greatest athletic triumph to date when one of its headliners, Brooks Koepka, emphatically won the P.G.A. Championship.

By Thursday morning, though, LIVs road show had been reinfused with the political bent that has trailed the second-year circuit as it has convulsed professional golf: the loquacious, limelight-seizing presence of former President Donald J. Trump, who is hosting one of the leagues tournaments this weekend at a course northwest of Washington.

Whether LIV can outrun Trumps shadow, and whether it even wants to, could do much to shape how the league is perceived in the years ahead, particularly in the United States, where it has struggled to gain a meaningful foothold against the PGA Tour.

But for now, besides major tournament winners like Koepka and Phil Mickelson who have joined the circuit, there is probably no figure beyond golf more publicly linked to LIV than Trump, who has repeatedly and enthusiastically cheered Saudi Arabias thunderous, flashy entrance into sports. At its events, he often seems like an eager M.C. whose role is at once decidedly conspicuous and deeply mysterious neither the Trump Organization nor LIV have disclosed how much money the former presidents company is making for the events as the league looks to make inroads in a hidebound sport.

They want to use my properties because theyre the best properties, Trump said on Thursday, when he spent five hours appearing in a pro-am event with the LIV players Graeme McDowell and Patrick Reed (and staging what amounted to a rolling news conference about politics and an infomercial about his property over 18 holes along the Potomac River).

The Trump portfolio does indeed feature some exceptional courses, including the Washington-area location, which once held a Senior P.G.A. Championship, and LIV executives have said in the past that they were drawn to them because many top-caliber properties in the United States were not willing to host a circuit intended to rival the PGA Tour. But Trumps persistent, growing place in LIVs orbit also invites sustained skepticism of the motives and intentions of the league, which some critics see as a glossy way for Saudi Arabia to rehabilitate its image.

The former president is unbothered by the leagues patron, Saudi Arabias sovereign wealth fund, and the kingdoms budding place in professional golf, despite its record of human rights abuses. He is still casting aside objections from family members of Sept. 11 victims, some of whom believe Saudi Arabia played a role in the 2001 attacks, because, as he said Thursday, LIV tournaments are great economic development. He is openly admiring the millions and millions of dollars that the Saudis are raining down onto players and, of course, properties like his, even though he asserted Thursday that hosting tournaments amounts to peanuts for me. This year, LIV will travel to three of his properties, up from two in its inaugural season.

He has remained steadfast in his loyalty even though a special counsel from the Justice Department, Jack Smith, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to LIV.

In an interview as he walked between holes on Thursday, Trump described Smiths aggressive approach as retribution because the Biden administration wants to do something to take the spotlight off whats taken place. He said he did not know why his ties to LIV had drawn the special counsels scrutiny.

Trumps affection for LIV can be traced, at least in part, to years of friction with golfs establishment.

In 2016, the PGA Tour ended a longstanding relationship with Trumps course in Doral, Fla., near Miami, because of what its then-commissioner described as fundamentally a sponsorship issue. And in 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the P.G.A. of America which is separate from the PGA Tour abandoned its plan to host its flagship mens championship at a Trump property in New Jersey in 2022.

Trump has not fared much better abroad. The R&A, which organizes the British Open, has signaled it does not intend to take the tournament back to Trump-controlled Turnberry, where LIVs commissioner, Greg Norman, won one of his two Opens.

LIV has embraced Trump, though, and in return gotten a former presidents imprimatur, along with bursts of news coverage for events that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. He brings prestige and power, diluted as both might be by the divisiveness in which he revels.

They have unlimited money and they love it, he said Thursday, and its been great publicity for Saudi Arabia.

But for every day Trump appears at a LIV event, it is a day that LIV might as well write off as one in which it will not escape the pointed questions that it has spent a year trying to move past, or at least saying it wants to move past.

It has been hard enough for the league, even on a day when Trump is not playing a round, not to have its players confronting questions about the morality of accepting millions in Saudi money.

Were contracted to play golf, Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner who finished in a tie for fourth at the P.G.A. Championship last weekend, said on Wednesday. I think the most important part is to provide great entertainment wherever possible on whatever platform that is, whatever platform that provides it. When you can talk about ethics, thats peoples perception. I completely disagree with it, but everybody has the right to their own opinion, and Id say, was it worth it? Absolutely.

But DeChambeau hardly has the same megaphone or presence as a former occupant of the Oval Office. When Trump appears at a LIV event, even winners of the Masters Tournament or the U.S. Open are relegated to supporting actors.

LIV executives have generally brushed aside questions about whether the former president is good for business, or merely essential for it, given their troubles landing quality venues. They seem convinced that, at some point, sports will overtake politics, which might be wishful thinking since Trump suggested Thursday that nothing not even a return to the White House would easily dissuade him from doing business with the league.

But LIVs strategy still involves a gamble that the presence of one of the nations most polarizing figures will not scare off even more of the sponsorship contracts and television rights that are already proving hard to come by for the operation. And Trump can just as easily alienate prospective fans as he can entice them.

Trump himself insists that LIV craves him at its events and that he is not a distraction from the leagues proclaimed goal of growing the sport and giving it doses of needed energy.

They wanted me to be here, and I said sure, said Trump, who said that LIVs contracts with his properties did not require his appearances in events like the pro-am.

Perhaps all of that is true. But as long as it is, LIV will linger in the political thicket, no matter how well Koepka plays on the games biggest stages.

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LIV Golf Wants to Talk About Sports. Donald Trump Still Looms. - The New York Times

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalated his hostilities with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday, arguing that his Republican presidential rival was weak on crime and immigration, and accusing him of ceding critical decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.

In an appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, of moving left on criminal justice and immigration issues after winning over the partys base in 2015 and 2016.

He pledged that he would repeal what is known as the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice measure signed into law by Mr. Trump in 2018 that expanded early-release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill, Mr. DeSantis said. It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.

This year, The New York Times reported that Mr. DeSantis and his allies saw the criminal justice bill, which Mr. Trump signed at the urging of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and instantly regretted as an area of political weakness, and that Mr. DeSantis had signaled he would use it in the nomination fight. The bill is unpopular with parts of Mr. Trumps hard-core base.

But for Mr. DeSantis, assailing Mr. Trump over the First Step Act is potentially complicated. Mr. DeSantis himself voted for the first version of the bill when he was in Congress, and Trump allies have sought to highlight that fact.

So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He cant run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors thats who he is.

(Mr. DeSantiss allies note that the version of the bill he voted for looked significantly different, and that the final version passed when he was no longer in the House.)

When Mr. Shapiro asked Mr. DeSantis about Mr. Trumps recent criticism that crime had risen on his watch in Florida, the former presidents adopted state, Mr. DeSantis bristled and said Mr. Trumps policies had undermined law and order.

Mr. DeSantis stepped up his attacks on his onetime ally, whom he had avoided criticizing directly for months, less than 48 hours after he entered the race in a bumpy Twitter event.

And as Mr. DeSantis seems to veer to the right on issues like crime, some of his campaigns internal strategy is coming to light.

At a fund-raising meeting in Miami on Thursday, donors peppered Mr. DeSantiss top campaign staff members with questions about his policy positions and how they should be presented to other Republicans, according to a leaked audio recording posted online by the website Florida Politics.

One donor raised a question about the rightward shift, to which a campaign official eventually responded, We just got to win a primary in order to be in a general.

The donors and officials also discussed how to talk to Republicans who support abortion rights. (Mr. DeSantis last month signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, which contains limited exceptions, while Mr. Trump has been hesitant to support a federal ban.)

A donor offered one possible answer.

Abortion is safe, legal and rare in Florida, he said, parroting a phrase coined by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. It has not been banned, he added. It is limited.

In his interview with Mr. Shapiro on Friday, Mr. DeSantis sought to cast himself as unwavering on illegal immigration, saying that Mr. Trump had attacked him for opposing amnesty legislation while in Congress.

He also faulted Mr. Trump for his administrations handling of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, especially the level of influence exerted by Dr. Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease expert and face of the federal governments pandemic response.

Dr. Fauci, who retired in January, has been a frequent target of Republican attacks over issues like remote learning, stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates.

He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States, Mr. DeSantis said. I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way.

He said that Dr. Fauci should have been fired, but Mr. Trump had honored him.

I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trumps last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Faucis lockdowns, Mr. DeSantis said.

A day earlier, in a post by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform, the former president slammed Mr. DeSantis over Floridas response to the pandemic. He said that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had done a better job limiting the loss of lives to the virus than Mr. DeSantis had.

Mr. DeSantis described Mr. Trumps claim as very bizarre, and said that it suggested he would double down on his actions if there were another pandemic.

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DeSantis Steps Up Attacks on Trump, Hitting Him on Crime and Covid - The New York Times

I am not one of Donald Trumps lawyers, and like a close colleague who turned down an invitation to be his attorney, would never take on a client so impossible to control. Yet, blown away by the latest absurd blunder committed by Team Trump, I feel compelled to offer the former president a bit of gratuitous advice.

What has triggered my generosity is the ridiculous letter written by Trump attorneys John Rowley and James Trusty to Attorney General Merrick Garland, seeking a meeting with him prior to any charges being filed against their client, to discuss what they consider an unfair investigation by special counsel Jack Smith.

It is commonplace for counsel to reach out to prosecutors before an indictment is filed to better understand what the client is facing and to see if there are any mutually acceptable alternatives to indictment. In fact, in my book The Vanishing Trial I describe part of such a meeting I had, as a federal prosecutor, with legendary courtroom lawyer Milton Gould on the eve of the prosecution of a bank he represented.

So, what is there to criticize Trumps team for? Plenty.

Lets begin with the addressee, Attorney General Merrick Garland. The letter should not have been written to him, but to Jack Smith, the public official in charge of the investigations, and the one who will be making the charging decisions. Unless Garland finds Smiths prosecutorial recommendations substantially without merit, Smiths recommendations will stand. So, the request to meet will inevitably be denied as it was sent to the wrong person. But worse, the correct addressee, Jack Smith, will surely not be pleased by the blatant attempt to exclude him from the process by going over his head to his boss.

Worse still, the letter to Garland makes totally unnecessary, absurd, and insulting accusations about the investigations of the former president, calling them baseless, outrageous, and unlawful. It is hard to imagine an approach so well calculated to cause the reader to reject what is being requested. Once again, Team Trump has sacrificed intelligent, practical lawyering at the altar of media coverage. And granted, the letter has received that. But it hasnt exactly helped their client. The end result is that, as usual, Trump and his team have made a bad situation even harder on themselves.

While it may be understandable that a thin-skinned egomaniac with his liberty on the line might be unable to control himself, how do his lawyers embrace such lunacy? Is it fear of losing the client, complete ineptitude, or some combination of both? Is there no attorney out there capable of getting Trump to act in his own self-interest? In the 1980s and 1990s I worked closely on several criminal cases and one major trial with the late Jay Goldberg, then Trumps main attorney. In a 1991 survey of New York City lawyers and judges, Goldberg was deemed the best pure trial lawyer in town. Jay would never have put up with todays Donald Trump.

As neither Rowley, Trusty, nor anyone else seems to have been able to effectively provide Trump with proper guidance moving forward, I will take it upon myself to offer the former president a reality-based assessment and some free advice.

Sir, you are the principal target of at least three grand jury investigations, two of which are known to be near or at the indictment stage. Many people close to you, including some of your lawyers, have been either forced or have volunteered to testify against you. Coupled with the self-defeating statements you have already made that will be used against you (as in the E. Jean Carroll case that you just lost) and your astounding inability to be an effective witness on your own behalf, the cases will all be especially strong.

The federal government wins 90 percent of the criminal cases it tries, including cases much weaker than those being finalized against you. Because in the federal system, losing at trial means very high jail terms, 98 percent of all federally indicted defendants make plea deals and avoid trial. (For more on these numbers, I again invite you to read The Vanishing Trial.)

As difficult as it is to beat federal prosecutors once, beating them multiple times is nearly impossible. On top of all that, you are already facing state criminal charges in New York, and some time over the summer, it is expected you will be indicted on racketeering charges in Georgia. In sum, you have got to go 5-for-5, and thus far, on the legal diamond, you have proved yourself neither an Aaron Judge nor a Mike Trout.

That said, given the uniqueness of your present political position and prior presidential status, there are any number of potential steps to take that can surely be used to lessen the blow and help you ultimately survive. You can still avoid the worst consequences that lay ahead. Perhaps you have not yet given thought to what state-operated jails in Georgia must be like, but I assure you they will be less comfortable than Mar-a-Lago. In short, despite your suicidal instincts and precarious legal position, there is still time to help shape the situation to mitigate (though not eliminate) the ultimate consequences that will fall upon you.

Needlessly insulting those whose hands are tightening around your neck does not help. By continually shooting yourself in the foot, you have been left both immobile and terminally bleeding. A change of course is necessary.

This advice is offered free of charge, as part of my lawyers annual pro bono obligations

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Donald Trump investigations: Legal advice for the ex-president in ... - Slate

Ron DeSantis is girding for battle with Donald J. Trump where he believes the former president may be most vulnerable to attack from a fellow Republican: on substance.

Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, is expected to make a series of policy-based arguments, according to his public statements and interviews with people who have met with him privately and described their conversations on the condition of anonymity.

He is telling Republicans that, unlike the mercurial Mr. Trump, he can be trusted to adhere to conservative principles; that Mr. Trump is too distractible and undisciplined to deliver conservative policy victories such as completing his much-hyped border wall; and that any policy promises Mr. Trump makes to conservatives are worthless because he is incapable of defeating President Biden.

Mr. DeSantiss challenge is obvious to anyone who has seen a recent poll: Mr. Trump maintains a deep psychological hold over many Republican voters who appear immune to reasoned arguments against him.

The thrice-married Mr. Trump, who stands accused of hush-money payments to women including a porn star, has never been the avatar of a social conservative. But he largely governed as one. That he was motivated more by transaction than by conviction was irrelevant to millions of evangelicals who cheered as he brought about a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

But Mr. DeSantis is expected to argue that the reason Mr. Trump made so many ideologically inexplicable personnel decisions like elevating Dr. Anthony S. Fauci at the outset of the Covid crisis was because he has no fixed principles to fall back on when he faced difficult decisions.

By contrast, allies say that Mr. DeSantis will try to make the case to Republican voters that they can trust him to stand his ground on tough issues like abortion.

People who have spent time privately with Mr. DeSantis describe him as an ideologue whose happy place is a quiet room where he can read an academic journal or policy paper. Somewhat socially awkward, he peppers his conversations with references to the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and Supreme Court case law.

Mr. Trump has never been accused of citing the Federalist Papers in casual conversation. His attention span for policy is limited at best. He has powerful gut instincts on trade, immigration and some aspects of foreign policy, but in most policy areas he is open to deal-making or to the suggestions of whoever spoke to him last.

Here are five of their likeliest friction points on policy.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, Mr. Trump has appeared uncomfortable with the consequences of his signature achievement. He privately blamed abortion hard-liners for Republicans disappointing results in the midterm elections, has refused to say whether he would support a national abortion ban and implied Floridas new six-week abortion ban was too harsh.

Mr. DeSantis has seized on those remarks, and his allies hope the issue helps him make inroads with the Christian right. Protecting an unborn child when theres a detectable heartbeat is something that almost 99 percent of pro-lifers support, Mr. DeSantis said recently, noting that Mr. Trump, as a Florida resident, hadnt said whether he would have signed the heartbeat bill.

Still, despite supporting abortion rights for most of his adult life, Mr. Trump was the most consequential anti-abortion president in history. He reminds conservative audiences that while previous Republican presidents made plenty of promises, he was the one who ended Roe.

Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump differ in their approaches to corporate America.

Mr. DeSantis subscribes to the theory, popular among the self-described New Right, that leftists have taken over so many American institutions including academia, the media and big corporations that conservatives are fools to cede these battlefields to progressives in the name of limited government.

Instead, Mr. DeSantis argues that conservatives must use every lever of government power to fight back and if that leaves traditional conservatives feeling squeamish, then so be it.

Mr. Trump has flirted with this idea but never fully bought into it. He has fought against so-called environmental, social and governance investments, railed against social media companies for their treatment of conservatives and enacted tariffs that enraged multinationals. But he also slashed taxes for corporations and invited chief executives he would later deride as globalists into the Oval Office and onto his business councils.

A longtime New York businessman, Mr. Trump loves, above all, to be seen cutting a deal. He sees Mr. DeSantiss fights against woke Disney as futile and bad for Floridas economy. He has cheered on the recent efforts by Robert A. Iger, Disneys chief executive, to outmaneuver Mr. DeSantis.

Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have split in important ways on two pivotal foreign policy questions: how to deal with China, and what role the United States should play in Ukraines war against Russia.

Mr. Trump has been credited for prodding Republicans and Democrats into viewing China as a ruthless adversary rather than an imperfect trading partner. But for most of his presidency, Mr. Trump saw the U.S.-China relationship through a purely economic lens.

He praised President Xi Jinping of China as he chased a trade deal that he could trumpet to American farmers. He imposed tariffs on China but rejected other measures like sanctioning Chinese officials for human rights atrocities, lest that interfere with his trade deal. It was only in 2020, after Mr. Trump blamed the Chinese Communist Party for the spread of Covid, that he finally sidelined his administrations China doves and fully empowered its hawks.

Mr. DeSantis cares less about U.S.-China trade and more about the national security threats that Beijing poses. As governor, he signed a law banning Chinese social media platforms such as TikTok from state government devices and another that will stop many Chinese citizens and companies with ties to its government from buying property in Florida. Mr. Trump has promised to enact similar restrictions on Chinese investment and has called for China to pay trillions of dollars of Covid reparations, but his record suggests he will be more open than Mr. DeSantis to negotiating with Beijing.

On Ukraine, Mr. Trump has gone further than Mr. DeSantis in ruling out American support for Kyiv. While Mr. Trump called Russias invasion a crime against humanity in the early days of the war, he has more recently refused to draw any moral distinction between the Ukrainians and the Russians saying only that a deal must be struck. He has mused about handing over chunks of Ukraine to Russia.

After dodging questions about Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis told the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that defending Ukraine against Russia was not a vital U.S. interest and dismissed the war as a territorial dispute. Stung by criticism, Mr. DeSantis walked back the territorial dispute line, and in a subsequent interview he called Mr. Putin a war criminal. Mr. Trump refused to do the same when asked to on CNN.

While both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are contemptuous of international institutions such as the United Nations, the former president poses a more significant threat to the post-World War II international security framework.

Mr. Trumps former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, feared his boss would withdraw the United States from NATO and grew convinced he would do so if he won re-election to a second term. Now, Mr. Trump validates those fears on his campaign website, pledging to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally re-evaluating NATOs purpose and NATOs mission.

In Republican nominating contests before the age of Trump, the leading candidates tended to fight over who was more fiscally conservative who would abolish more federal agencies and who was more likely to reduce the federal government to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub, as the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist put it.

But Mr. Trump has redefined the G.O.P. primary campaign into a battle over who is the most protectionist on trade, and who will most faithfully preserve government benefits for the elderly. Mr. DeSantis, who rose in politics as a Tea Party fiscal conservative, has so far shown little interest in trying to out-populist the former president on government spending and trade, and seems to hope he can reorient the partys conversation around fiscal discipline.

Mr. Trump and his super PAC have called out Mr. DeSantiss congressional votes to cut spending on Social Security and Medicare. Mr. DeSantis has said he wont mess with Social Security for seniors currently dependent on the program, but unlike Mr. Trump, he has not ruled out trimming entitlement spending in ways that would affect younger Americans when they retire.

Mr. Trump has initiated attacks against Mr. DeSantis for his past efforts to kill the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires ethanol to be blended into the nations fuel supply. Fiscal conservatives see this as big government overreach, but Mr. Trump knows how important ethanol is to Iowas economy.

Mr. Trumps allies plan to portray Mr. DeSantis as weak on trade meaning he wont use tariffs as aggressively as the former president, who proudly branded himself a tariff man and launched trade wars with China and Europe. Mr. Trump has promised that in a second term he would introduce a new system of universal baseline tariffs that rewards domestic production while taxing foreign companies.

Mr. DeSantis will contrast his budget surpluses in Florida to the trillions of dollars Mr. Trump added to the national debt when he was president. Mr. DeSantis will point out that as a member of Congress he voted against the trillion-dollar-plus spending bills that then-President Trump signed into law in 2017 and 2018. And Mr. DeSantis plans to tie Mr. Trump to high inflation by criticizing his appointment of Jerome H. Powell as Federal Reserve chairman.

Mr. DeSantis has signed hard-line legislation on crime, including a law that lowers the threshold for imposing the death penalty.

Mr. Trump, who has cultivated a law-and-order persona, undercut that image in office by allowing his more liberal son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to lead bipartisan negotiations on a criminal justice law that would shorten federal prison sentences.

Mr. Trump quickly regretted signing that law, known as the First Step Act, and blamed Mr. Kushner. Privately, Mr. Trumps own advisers have acknowledged the First Step Act is a vulnerability with his political base.

Yet Mr. DeSantiss ability to directly attack Mr. Trump over the law is complicated by the fact that, along with most Republicans, he voted for the initial House version of it one that focused narrowly on prison reform and was opposed by civil rights groups and many Democrats. The much different version that passed, enacted when Mr. DeSantis was no longer in Congress, included sentencing reforms and the ability to apply retroactively for a reduced sentence.

The well-funded super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis is expected to attack Mr. Trumps record on crime.

And in something of a course correction, Mr. Trump has called for imposing the death penalty for drug dealing, sending the National Guard into high-crime areas and deploying the U.S. military against Mexican drug cartels.

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The Policy Fights Where DeSantis Sees His Chance to Hit Trump - The New York Times