REPUBLICANS AGAINST REPUBLICANS. If anything embodies the sort of Washington insiderdom that populists of both parties hate, it is the annual Gridiron dinner. The oldest of Washington’s journalistic institutions, the white-tie dinner each year features politicians and journalists putting on comedy routines that are supposed to be self-deprecating, and sometimes are quite funny, but are also at times painfully flat. In any event, club tradition calls for the routines to “singe, not burn,” their targets. [Note: I have never attended a Gridiron dinner and rely on media reports for details.]
Since the dinner is put on by pillars of the journalistic establishment, there are a lot of liberals and Democrats in the room. Thus there is a temptation for conservative and Republican speakers, eager for acceptance, to do a little extra singeing of Republican subjects. A case in point is the routine by New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu at the dinner last weekend. This is an account of Sununu’s routine from Politico Playbook:
“You know, he’s probably going to be the next president,” Sununu said of Trump, musing about his “experience,” “sense of integrity” and the “rationale” he brought to his tweets. As the room quieted to see where he was going with this, he paused, then yelled: “Nah, I’m just kidding. He’s F—ING CRAZY!” The ballroom roared with laughter. “ARE YOU KIDDING?! Come on. You guys are buying that? I said love it. … He just stresses me out so much! … I’m going to deny I ever said it.”
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Sununu also added: “The press often will ask me if I think Donald Trump is crazy. And I’ll say it this way: I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution. But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out!”
Sununu said other things, and it appears there is no publicly available recording of his remarks, so there is no way for someone who didn’t attend to know precisely what he said. But we certainly know the Trump routine scored best with the crowd.
Now, Sununu said he did not mean what he said literally, that it was all humor, which one has to understand in context of the Gridiron tradition. “It’s all a joke,” Sununu said in an interview with New Hampshire Today. “Look, I don’t think he’s crazy. It’s all in fun, it’s all a joke, and anyone who’s trying to make this to be more than it is either seriously doesn’t understand what the Gridiron dinner is all about or just has to, you know, lighten up a little bit, get a sense of humor.”
Sununu spent part of Monday cleaning up after himself. But there is no doubt his Trump routine will come back to bite him at some point. The problem will not be that he might oppose Trump, although Sununu supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Many Republicans are trying to move the party toward a post-Trump future. The problem for Sununu is that having gained notoriety for a Trump-is-crazy routine that would make Democrats envious, at a super-insider Washington journalism gathering, is not really the way to move the Republican Party toward a post-Trump future.
One of those Republicans moving the party is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is not clear whether DeSantis, who is up for reelection in Florida this year, will run for president in 2024. There appears to be a kind of delicate dance going on between him and Trump, who constantly hints that he will run again. But DeSantis appears to be a solid second-place choice in polls of Republicans’ 2024 preferences.
Now DeSantis is under attack from yet another Republican governor: Larry Hogan of Maryland. In a recent appearance on CNN, Hogan slammed the controversial parental rights bill, the one Democrats call “Don’t Say Gay,” that DeSantis signed into law in Florida. “I think the bill was kind of absurd and not something that would’ve happened in our state,” Hogan said. “I didn’t really actually see the details of the legislation, but the whole thing seems like a crazy fight. And now he wants to criticize Disney for expressing how they feel about that bill. I mean, they have every right to. We have a thing called freedom of speech. They can come out and say what they think.”
Perhaps Hogan should have actually seen the details of the legislation before delivering an opinion. If he had, he would have known that it is a reasonable measure applying to the classroom instruction of Florida children from kindergarten through third grade. It’s always good to know what you’re talking about when you speak, especially if you’re a governor appearing in the media.
What’s going on? Are these just two completely different stories? In fact, the Sununu-Trump and DeSantis-Hogan kerfuffles are examples of a growing conflict inside the GOP — growing because elections are coming up and the party’s power structure is undefined. Republicans need to sketch out a post-Trump platform, not the least because Trump, were he to run again, would be asking the nation to put him in office until he is 82 years old — the same as President Joe Biden, who seems increasingly unable to handle the rigors of the presidency. A possible candidate like DeSantis fuses some of the elements of Trump’s platform with a sharp but still more conventional style of governing. Other candidates seek to return the GOP to a pre-Trump world. They’re all bumping up against each other. The outcome of the struggle will define the Republican Party for years to come.
So the little fights are part of a bigger, very meaningful fight. No matter what anybody says — it is definitely not a joke.
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