DeSantis can carve a path in an alpha male showdown if he can thread the needle and convince Conservatives he’s Trump without garbage, one Christian broadcaster says.
Robert Kennedy, the son of former U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, is a name to be reckoned with. He could swing the election without winning the Democratic primary in the eyes of one correspondent who covers Washington for The Australian, the national daily newspaper for the Land Down Under.
Adam Creighton says he saw in Kennedy’s announcement speech two weeks ago in Boston the potential for a “unifying candidate” that America hasn’t seen in a while.
“He really made a point of not singling out Republicans and criticizing them the way President Biden does all the time with all of his MAGA rhetoric and semi-facism,” Creighton said on American Family Radio Tuesday. “That was a real contrast, and he praised Donald Trump slightly in parts. It really felt like he wanted to bring everyone on board.”
Indeed, there were themes in Kennedy’s opening night that could appeal to Trump voters.
Kennedy has made headlines with his opposition to vaccine mandates, and while he has sounded warnings about climate change in the past that wasn’t a central component of his first speech.
“He’s kind of like a 1960s Democrat, a party of policies. That might seem strange to some members of the modern party,” Creighton told show host Jenna Ellis. “It was interesting that in his two-hour address I don’t think he used the phrase climate change once. He talked about the environment a lot, and the importance of preserving the environment, but there was little discussion of climate change..."
Republican voters may not realize climate change is an apocalyptic-like topic for many Democrat voters, who believe mankind is destroying the planet with fossil fuels, so Creighton believes Kennedy's decision to skirt around the topic symbolizes "tension" between two wings of the party, the wealthy elites and grassroots supporters.
Guys on girls teams: Just say No
Kennedy is also on record opposing biological males competing in women’s sports, which is also a forbidden crime in his political party. Being "transphobic" is compared to murder by LGBT activists, since transgenders suffer from high suicide rates and hence "misgendering" and harming them emotionally could trigger suicidal thoughts.
Some theorize that if Kennedy doesn’t win the nomination against an unpopular incumbent in President Joe Biden that he could do serious damage to Biden and the Democrats as an independent candidate.
“I mean, it could actually deliver the whole election to, to Donald Trump because let's say that he runs as a third-party candidate and gets 15% or 20% of the vote, right? That's going to have huge consequences for the Democrats,” Creighton said. “I would expect that somehow the Democrat party would try to convince Kennedy not to do that, but I don’t know what they’re going to offer him. It’s not like they’re going to offer him fame or money. He already has those things. So maybe they would offer him a job in the administration.”
Polls right now give Trump a big lead on the Republican side, so much so that he’s floated the idea that he might skip debates.
There’s still a path for DeSantis, says David Brody, the chief political analyst for the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“This is hard, but [DeSantis] has to be statesmanlike but alpha male. He has to be Trump minus the pettiness, the fighting. He has to rise above it," Brody told AFR in a Tuesday interview. If people can see Trump in DeSantis to a degree then I think that’s the way, but it’s going to be difficult."
DeSantis has yet to officially enter the race yet for months has been widely considered the top primary competition for the Trump.
“He has to thread the needle. It’s going to be hard, but he has to draw a contrast,” Brody told show host Jenna Ellis.
Last week the campaign manager for outsider and longshot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy predicted his candidate would supplant DeSantis as Trump’s main challenger.
For now, the Republican side is led by the bombastic former president and a theoretical challenger.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views
Kennedy, 69, is an environmental lawyer and author and his been criticized for his anti-vaccine views.
At one time he compared vaccine mandates in the U.S. to the political climate under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, and none of us can hide,” he said.
Kennedy’s comments were criticized, and he later apologized.
In his book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” Kennedy promoted the drugs ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatment options.
In spite of that unpopular view among Democrats, Creighton sees Kennedy gaining momentum.
The intersection of Biden’s approval ratings and a Kennedy rise could lead to more names in the hunt for the Democratic nomination. The most likely names would be Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom.
“The more popular that Kennedy becomes in the primary, the more likely it is a Newsom or Whitmer, or someone like that, decides to throw their hat in the ring late in the day," Creighton predicts. "They’ll smell blood, and they’ll see the weakness of Joe Biden and the possibility that someone could actually topple him."
A prediction: DeSantis goes after Trump
The current Republican landscape leaves Christians with a dilemma on how to respond to two different biblical mandates, Brody said. Justice and mercy are both presented in the same sentence in Micah 6:8.
“How do we balance law and order, and fighting for truth and justice and righteousness, with what the Bible also compels us to do, which is to be graceful, to be compassionate?” Brody said.
The Left, said the veteran CBN correspondent, tends to focus on only one of the mandates.
“They decide that the compassion and the grace and Matthew 25 and all that social justice stuff, that's their gospel. That’s what they focus on,” Brody said. “Well, have you split the difference between being compassionate but also fighting for what's right and true and just moral."
Trump was willing to fight and demonstrated that "revolutionary spirit," Brody observed, and Gov. DeSantis is demonstrating it now.
Finally, Brody advised that DeSantis can overcome this early deficit but he’s going to have to do it by beating Trump at Trump’s game.
“When DeSantis is in the ring with Trump it's a little harder for DeSantis to operate in that venue because I think he's better on paper than in practice,” Brody said. “Ultimately what’s going to happen is DeSantis is going to have to go after Trump. Trump’s going after DeSantis, and DeSantis can only be disciplined for so long.”
