While Trump is doing a good job winning over Republican élites, Ron DeSantis has struggled. In a new Q. & A., IChotiner speaks with the Republican congressman Lance Gooden about Desantis’s “electability” problem.
Last week, DeSantis went to Washington, D.C., where he met with a group of Republican lawmakers to try to shore up support. One of them, Representative Lance Gooden, of Texas, made an endorsement shortly afterward—for Trump. Gooden is in his third term representing Texas’s Fifth District; he voted against certifying electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2020. Gooden and I recently spoke by phone about his endorsement, the G.O.P.
Washington is very much a back-slapping, cigar-smoking, beer-drinking-type city. Because he did not do that, and because he was also in the Freedom Caucus, where they inevitably annoy some folks from time to time, I don’t know that he had those close relationships. When he got to Florida—I think he’s done a fantastic job, but I don’t know that he has the personal touch that perhaps Donald Trump has or that I understand his wife, Mrs. DeSantis, has. He has struggled with that.
I think Trump’s defenders might say that he was trying to get all the different opinions so that he could find the best one. It was a management style. One argument you could make against Trump is that he lost the last election, although I know that you objected to the election results, so maybe you don’t think he lost the last election. But how do you synthesize that with the idea of him being electable?
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