sunday , i m abby phillip. thank you for joining. it is all about iowa, iowa. and yesterday marks the first start of the caucus season with eight presidential hopefuls gathered in des moines to raise money for veterans but there was one notable exception and that was donald trump. but, donald trump s war are rob desantis still dominated the race in the last week and boy have things escalated. with trump in iowa and desantis crisscrossing through multiple early states, they sparred over who could best make america great again. let s just be clear. it really does take two terms as president to be able to finish this job. you don t need eight years. you need six months. we could turn this thing around so quickly. in you need eight years, who the hell wants to wait eight years. anyone that said that they could slay the deep state in six months should be asked why didn t you do that when you have four years to try to do that?
the trump/desantis battle evolved into a schoolyard brawl. you don t change your name in the middle of the election. his whole family moved to florida under my governorship. are you kidding me? what is the desantis plan to convince voters he s not just a better nominee but a better president. plus the gop field keeps growing. three more candidates will jump in this week including trump s former vp. republicans have to offer a positive vision grounded in conservative principles. but how many of them will make it to the republican debate stage? and disaster averted. no one got everything wanted but the american people got what they needed. the president said it is proof his brand of politics still works. i know bipartisanship is hard but we could never stop trying. welcome to inside politics
there are rules on debates. but, yeah, we know that. and it is actually not you re not off base if terms of even asking the question because there is the subtext of trump wants to skip debates and desantis wants to skip debates. we re in june and we don t know what the debate schedule looks like. we don t. but we do know that trump has been willing in the past to skip debates an how important debates are to him. he loves saying, i won the debate. as he screamed to me on the phone once. he loves being on stage. he loves that contrast. and so it is hard for me to see him not actually being on this debate stage. he s probably swallow his pride, one of the few moments he does that and say he will support the eventual nominee and say it s him. ab here is a flashback of trump on the debate stage. i think you re on the wrong side of this if you re still arguing for a single i don t think you heard me. you re having a hard time tonight.
necessarily he s running like a different kind of trumpism. like we ve talked about. there is not a lot of contrasts for desantis to withdraw and bring it into the next generation. mike pence sounds like he s just popped out of a time capsule from 1996 and hopeful that people would like to go back to that time. it doesn t seem like there is a huge market for that. we re going to see how this plays out. i think that you could sort of laugh at some of the guys and say where is your lane, what are you doing? your polling at 1% or 2%. presidential politics, all of these guys have huge egos and they all believe they should be running and given the vulnerabilities that desantis has shown is not the clear alternative to trump and given the legal jeopardy that trump finds himself in, it is understanding why you see a lot of candidates sit there and say
that desantis is trying to do, but it is the same thing. to try to out-trump, trump. to say i m the more mannered trump, i don t know if that is going to work. we ll find out because he has to draw contrasts but at the same time he needs a lot of trump voters to see something they like in trump in him. in friday i spoke to evangelical leader bob about the evangelical vote and also about iowa and here is what he said. i think you sense in iowa a willingness to turn the page and primarily on, not because of what trump has done as president in the four years, but today s 2024, it is not 2016. they want somebody who could win. they want a new generational leader. that has a fission for the future, not a complaint about the past. i think iowa is wide open. this is going to be a really critical question. not just about iowa, but whether desantis could pull evangelical voters. he anted to move on from trump, but could desantis make the case