Facing off in Washington, DeSantis tries to shake Trump's hold on Christian right

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump clashed Friday before two crowds of social conservatives in Washington, with dueling speeches that demonstrated just how influential evangelical voters are expected to be in the presidential primary.

Promising to “put on the full armor of God” in his fight for the religious right, DeSantis made his most full-throated case yet as a presidential candidate for a social conservative agenda — and pledged to battle what he called the left’s “woke mind virus.”

“The battle lines are we must win the fight to restore religious freedom as the Founding Fathers intended it,” DeSantis on Friday evening told the Pray Vote Stand Summit, organized by the Family Research Council, and he promised to create new “divisions of conscience and religious freedom” inside federal agencies such as the Education and Labor departments.

Less than two miles away, Trump simultaneously spoke at another social conservative gathering, pressing his case that he had delivered for the religious right as president and would do so again.

“I love you,” Trump told the leadership summit of the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee. “And I hope you love me.”

The overlapping speeches punctuated the significant role that Christian conservatives will play in the 2024 nominating contest, beginning in Iowa, where white evangelicals are projected to be a sizable share of the likely electorate in January’s caucuses. DeSantis, in particular, urgently needs to make inroads with evangelical voters if he has any hope of closing his current polling deficit with Trump.

Quoting from the Bible and announcing new measures he would enact as president — including an executive order to ensure that private funding to nonreligious schools would also be available to faith-based private schools — DeSantis painted a dark portrait in his two speeches of a country suffering through a “national malaise,” with the religious right under intense siege.

He attacked the expansion of transgender rights, defended school-choice policies and invoked parental rights repeatedly. He also promised to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which forbids tax-exempt entities such as churches from participating in political campaigns for or against candidates.

“The left views leftist ideology as effectively the national religion,” DeSantis had told the women’s group earlier in the day. “They will tolerate our faith — as long as it doesn’t impact their agenda.” Trump echoed similar themes — with a strikingly different style that included attacking DeSantis by nickname and meandering into extraneous topics.

“We want to have choice in schools and we want to have choice in cars,” Trump said, pivoting in his speech from religious liberty to an aside about electric vehicles.

He mocked DeSantis as a political mimic, down to the way the governor sometimes tosses hats into crowds. “He gets low and he flicks his wrist,” Trump said, suggesting that DeSantis was copying his routine. “We don’t like these copycats, do we?”

And he reveled in his current advantage in the polls. Trump told the crowd: “I started hitting him, and they all said, ‘Sir, he’s a Republican, you shouldn’t hit him so hard.’ I said, ‘Like hell I shouldn’t.’ And he went down like an injured bird out of the sky. And I’m actually quite happy about that.”

The twice-divorced Trump was not a natural ally of social conservatives in his first campaign. But he hewed closely to their priorities as president and appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had been a decadeslong pursuit on the right.

“Women are not looking for a pastor or a husband when considering a presidential candidate, they are looking for a bodyguard, someone who will fight for them and their families on the issues they hold dear,” said Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America.

Asked if anyone could catch Trump in 2024, Nance said, “Well, that’s a heavy lift.”

At both events, Trump entered to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and soaked in applause, waiting for the song to end before he began to speak.

DeSantis has actively courted evangelical leaders, particularly in Iowa, where he began his campaign with a speech at an evangelical church in the suburbs of Des Moines. He is traveling to the state Saturday for another chance to woo evangelical voters at an event that is drawing most of the leading candidates in the 2024 race — except Trump. DeSantis has already visited more than half of Iowa’s 99 counties.

DeSantis has tried to use abortion as a wedge against Trump with social conservatives, noting Friday that he had signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida known as the Heartbeat Protection Act. Trump has implied that the law is “too harsh.”

But the issue has not helped DeSantis with primary voters. In a New York Times poll at the end of July, Trump was favored over DeSantis in a hypothetical head-to-head race 70 per cent to 25 per cent among voters who strongly supported a six-week ban.

Trump’s appointment of the justices that overturned Roe continues to resonate. When Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, mentioned those appointments, the crowd burst into applause. “He has fought for the unborn in America,” Perkins said.

The joint Washington visits were a sign of an intensifying campaign schedule with four months until the Iowa caucuses. Trump and DeSantis have made near-simultaneous stops in the same locations throughout the summer, even as Trump has kept up a relatively light campaign schedule: Both have attended a state party dinner in Iowa, the Iowa State Fair and an Iowa football game.

Trump skipped the first primary debate last month and is expected to bypass the second debate later this month, meaning that overlapping appearances are opportunities for DeSantis to sharpen the contrast with the primary front-runner. In an interview with CBS News this week, DeSantis, 45, spoke about what he argued was voters’ desire for a “generational passing of the torch,” in a jab at both President Joe Biden, 80, and Trump, 77.

“The presidency is not a job for someone that’s 80 years old,” DeSantis said.