TOM EATON

The last votes are still being counted from Tuesday’s midterm elections in the US, and 2024 is still a way away, but one result has delivered paradoxically terrible news to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Liberals had been bracing for a “red wave”, a long-feared Republican resurgence which would see the GOP seize back control of both the Senate and House. At the time of writing, however, only the House had turned red, with the incumbents still in charge in the Senate.

Inevitably, many right-wing pundits have started looking for someone to blame, and for the first time in six years, some of them are turning on the golden calf, Trump himself.

This pivot has been some time coming.

A year or two ago, endorsement by the liar-in-chief was priceless. But as Trump has doubled down on his Big Lie, he has been pulled into spaces occupied almost entirely by religious fundamentalists, paranoid militias, secessionists, QAnon believers, and people who genuinely believe that Joe Biden is dead and that the US is being run by a clone while simultaneously being run by Trump, who is still president, but somehow isn’t being allowed to be president. I’m not making this up.

In short, as Trump has embraced his most passionate supporters, he has drifted towards the fringe and away from those mainstream conservatives the GOP base deems solidly electable.

In the past few months, a number of his protégés have begun to struggle, and on Wednesday, as some of his most high-profile disciples lost their races, the word seeping out of Fox News was that Trumpism might have cost the GOP a bigger win, and that perhaps it was time for conservatives to abandon their false prophet and line up behind a new Chosen One.

Worse for Trump, DeSantis will be using an updated version of his own playbook against him. DeSantis is Trump 2.0; a streamlined, supercharged rollout of a rough, wild, prototype; a slick political product offering the same old-timey delights.

Enter Florida governor Ron DeSantis, combining hard-right conservatism with the oldest and slickest traditions of the mainstream political swamp, to win his race at a canter and position himself squarely as the GOP’s leading candidate in 2024.

Clearly he’s got Trump nervous. At a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump branded the Floridian “Ron DeSanctimonious”, a pretty good zinger given that Trump almost certainly didn’t know what it meant and was simply sounding out the words on his cue cards.

On Monday, however, Trump was in a much more familiar and comfortable place — the gutter — as he threatened his new rival with exposure. “I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal. “I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.”

Of course, Trump was right to be fearful, and after this week, he should be terrified. In a race to become the GOP presidential contender in 2024, DeSantis — a college baseball star who went to law school then became a decorated naval officer before marrying just one pretty TV presenter and producing three children — will wipe the floor with him.

Worse for Trump, DeSantis will be using an updated version of his own playbook against him. DeSantis is Trump 2.0; a streamlined, supercharged rollout of a rough, wild, prototype; a slick political product offering the same old-timey delights — denying women sovereignty over their own bodies, the marginalising of LGBTQI+ people, the denial that greenhouse gasses are causing or accelerating climate change, pretending immigrants are a cultural and political crisis rather than an economic necessity in southern Red states — but repackaged to look like truth, justice and freedom for all.

In 2020, Trump had to try to steal the election. In 2024, if DeSantis gets the nomination ahead of Trump and runs against 82-year-old Biden, his first term rounded out by what is increasingly looking like another housing market bust, the Floridian might only need to be himself to take the country by a nose and take it back a generation.