VERO BEACH, Fla. — The lion has lain down with the lamb.
The lion, of course, is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a former president himself, now confined during weekdays to sitting as quietly as he can tolerate, plainly bored except when sworn witnesses assail his character, portray him as a serial adulterer and say that he is part of a criminal conspiracy.
The lamb is the term-limited governor of Florida who once was regarded as the front-runner for the very presidential nomination his rival has wrapped up, a double Ivy League graduate who despises elitism, a complete flop in the Iowa caucuses he thought were his opening to political glory, and a dropout before a single voter went to the polls in New Hampshire.
But the two of them — Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis — created a zoological phenomenon the other day: The roaring lion and the humiliated lamb met in Miami, spending several hours together without apparent violence or visible rancor. The men dislike and resent each other. They also need each other.
Actually, what they each need is something the other possesses.
Trump is in financial straits, personally and politically. His trials have tapped his spirit, but they also have tapped his exchequer. In the past, he has needed money to feed his sense of self-worth. Now he needs it to fuel his campaign, strapped as he is with attorneys’ fees (which, if he reverts to form, he may not actually pay).
DeSantis is needy in a different way. He cannot run for a third term as governor here, and besides, his horizons are not confined to Tallahassee. He wants to be president, thinks he still can become president, and knows that he can’t be president without the Trump base. This onetime lion is cozying up to the real lion out of self-interest.
The two have circled each other warily for years. Trump endorsed DeSantis, then a little-known congressman, for governor, extracting a price in the form of a mortification that is the best 21st-century example of Samuel Johnson’s 18th-century definition of a patron: “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.”
When Trump seemed wounded — by failing to win reelection, by seeking to retain the presidency by overthrowing the principle of the peaceful exchange of power — DeSantis thought his main chance had arrived. Trump called him DeSanctimonious, which wasn’t far from accurate, and the Murdoch-owned New York Post called him DeFuture, which once seemed accurate and, DeSantis fervently believes, might be again.
So, what the heck. A few hours in Miami to secure his future options couldn’t hurt. DeSantis showed up, though he avoided a cringeworthy picture of the two, now comrades-in-arms who want to stay at arm’s length.
“Trump’s in the process of creating a vacuum,” said Mac Stipanovich, a onetime leading Florida political strategist, chief of staff to Gov. Bob Martinez, and campaign aide to Jeb Bush. “DeSantis needs to figure out how to succeed Trump as the Republicans’ leader without alienating the Trump fanatics who are the heart of the party.”
Stipanovich, who left the GOP after the Trump ascendancy, added: “The thinking has to be: Don’t challenge Trump. Fill the vacuum when he’s gone.”
DeSantis’ presidential campaign fell to Earth with a greater thud than did some of the biggest duds in political history — worse than the humiliating collapses of four Republican governors: Michigan’s George Romney (1968), California’s Pete Wilson (1996), Wisconsin’s Scott Walker (2016), and Florida’s Jeb Bush (2016). The only modern Democratic match in mortification is the disintegration of Sen. Edmund Muskie (1972).
But there’s a role model who might provide comfort to DeSantis: Richard Nixon.
He lost the 1960 election, then lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race. But he steeled himself to give a grudging endorsement to Barry Goldwater in 1964, spent 1966 campaigning for Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates, and then cashed in the chits he earned over rubbery chicken and powdered mashed potatoes and won the presidency in 1968.
DeSantis never turned up to his campaign events the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, returning quietly to Florida, humbled but determined to throw himself back into state business — so that he was able to claim, as his staff put it, a “record number of historic wins that have been delivered for the people of Florida.” These included a $14.6 billion budget surplus and measures that allowed him to claim having paid down a quarter of the state’s total debt. He prevailed in winning legislation for parental rights in education, school choice, and efforts to keep critical race theory out of the classroom — all measures appealing to the Trump base and the emerging new conservatives — even as he increased spending for schools and signed environmental legislation, both of which appeal to liberals.
The result: a 51% approval rating among Republicans, according to last month’s Morning Consult survey.
“Like all governors who are lame ducks, he’s thinking about his legacy,” said Susan MacManus, the University of South Florida political scientist regarded as one of the state’s top political analysts. “He’s going around the state, signing a bill here, talking about the budget there — the kind of thing that governors do. He’s recovered a little bit. Some people worried he’d be vindictive against the people who hadn’t supported him. He didn’t show that.”
On Wednesday, the ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy that he signed, and which he ballyhooed on the campaign, took effect. That puts him in greater favor with evangelicals than Trump himself, whose maneuvers on the abortion question have unsettled his religious-conservative backers.
Now Trump has one more outlier to lasso in: former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina. She’s far more valuable a catch than DeSantis. Only two weeks ago, she won 17% of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary even though she’s been out of the race for two months.
She’s an entirely different kind of animal than DeSantis — a fawn, you might say. Having laid down with the lamb, a moment projected by the Book of Isaiah, Trump needs now to turn to Claude Debussy and seek a meeting with Haley. It would be a call that, with artistic license, we might think of as the prelude to the afternoon of a fawn.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
