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'Playing it safe' and playing to lose: Trump's primary opponents' unique campaign strategies [1]

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Date: 2023-12-27

With Iowa’s GOP caucuses rapidly approaching on Jan. 15, one has to wonder how many of the participating candidates actually want to be president. As we all know, Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison, become dictator-for-life, rain terror down on his enemies, and force the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do his laundry every other Saturday. Meanwhile, two of Trump’s top rivals, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, are “playing it safe” and genuflecting to their ocher overlord, respectively.

Trump himself appears to be phoning it in in many respects. Perhaps he’s confident that his hold on the once-grand party—the one that he’s permanently curdled with his baleful basilisk gaze—is as solid as the four feet of cranium between consensus reality and his solipsistic CPU.

Then there’s Ramaswamy, who appears to be running for Trump sidekick/top sycophant. He’s seized on the brilliant strategy of getting his message out to far fewer people.

NBC News:

Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign has stopped spending money on television ads and does not have any TV ad reservations booked, according to his campaign and data from an ad-tracking firm. As recently as the first full week of December, the GOP entrepreneur’s campaign spent more than $200,000 on TV ads. Last week, it spent just $6,000 on ads — all of it on TV — figures from the firm AdImpact show.

According to Tricia McLaughlin, Ramaswamy’s campaign press secretary, this is actually a strategy. It’s hard to suss out exactly what that strategy might be, other than “if Vivek doesn’t make Donald too mad, maybe he’ll let him carry his golf clubs occasionally.”

“We are focused on bringing out the voters we’ve identified—best way to reach them is using addressable advertising, mail, text, live calls and doors to communicate with our voters on Vivek’s vision for America, making their plan to caucus and turning them out,” McLaughlin told NBC News’ Alexandra Marquez and Alex Tabet. “As you know, this isn’t what most campaigns look like. We have intentionally structured this way so that we have the ability to be nimble and hypertargeted in our ad spending.”

Sure, that sounds reasonable—if you’re not actually running for president.

That said, Ramaswamy is totally not sucking up to Trump just so he can be in his orbit when Dear Leader retakes his rightful place at the center of the universe. In fact, he said as much to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo this past weekend when asked if he was eyeing a future role with the Trump team: “I didn't get where I am, [my wife] Apoorva didn't get to where she is, by being 'plan B people,' and so I'm actually confident we’re going to over-deliver massively at the Iowa caucus.”

Uh-huh. Sure, Jan.

Meanwhile, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, arguably the least-barmy option for GOP voters this cycle, has seized on her own brilliant strategy: playing it safe!

In fact, that’s precisely how The New York Times framed her strategy in a headline Wednesday: “Nikki Haley’s Bold Strategy to Beat Trump: Play It Safe”

With under three weeks left until the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley is treading cautiously as she enters the crucial final stretch of her campaign to shake the Republican Party loose from the clutches of Mr. Trump. Even as the former president maintains a vast lead in polls, Ms. Haley has insistently played it safe, betting that an approach that has left her as the only non-Trump candidate with any sort of momentum can eventually prevail as primary season unfolds. On the trail, she rarely takes questions from reporters. She hardly deviates from her stump speech or generates headlines. And she keeps walking a fine line on her greatest obstacle to the Republican nomination — Mr. Trump. [...] Ms. Haley’s apparent reluctance to attack her rival even in the face of what would seem to be political setbacks for him has raised questions from voters and other Republican competitors — most notably, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — about whether she can win while passing up crucial opportunities to derail her most significant opponent.

The Times spoke with Adolphus Belk, a political science professor at Winthrop University, in South Carolina, who appears to have a firm grip on the obvious: “A lot of the people in this field are running against Trump without doing very much to take him on. If you are running to be president of the United States, it seems like it would be an imperative to take on the person who has the biggest lead.”

But hey, it’s not like Trump has any real vulnerabilities. Just the fact that he stole top secret documents and waves them in randos’ faces at the dinner table. Well, that and about a billion other things. Like the fact that an entire U.S. state has declared him ineligible to run because he’s an anti-American insurrectionist.

For his part, Ramaswamy pounced on that one and ran with it … right back to Daddy.

ABC News:

Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pledged on Tuesday to remove himself from Colorado’s Republican primary ballot in response to the state’s Supreme Court’s ruling that former President Donald Trump is ineligible to run in the state over his activity surrounding Jan. 6. Ramaswamy promised to stay off the ballot until Trump’s eligibility is restored. He called upon his and Trump’s 2024 GOP primary opponents to take the same steps. “I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary ballot until Trump is also allowed to be on the ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Nikki Haley do the same immediately – or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences for our country,” Ramaswamy said in a statement.

Oh, that’s brilliant—and a little like a football coach bitterly complaining that the other team keeps getting flagged for pass interference.

As for the other candidates’ strategies—does it really matter? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once seen as the top GOP rival to Trump, now appears to be running against Scott Walker for most unjustly hyped candidate of the 21st century—because DeSantis has never for a moment known how to run against Trump.

RELATED STORY: Ron DeSantis' Never Back Down PAC is ... well... backing down

We’ll see how things play out in the next few weeks, of course. Shocking outcomes—like a gormless reality star and failed casino magnate becoming president—occur in politics all the time. But if Haley or anyone else (besides former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who remains hated by nearly everyone) wants to make a serious move against Trump, maybe it's time to start acting like real presidential candidates.

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

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