Wednesday will see the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, which is slated to include Ron DeSantis and a handful of sideshow clowns who aren’t really running for president, but not frontrunner Donald Trump, who feels entitled to a coronation and doesn’t want to defend his record as a failed president.

From the start, I’ve had some reservations about DeSantis participating in any debate Trump doesn’t also attend, which runs the risk of casting him as just another also-ran like the people he’d be sharing the stage with, most of whom will have their fire focused on him. But DeSantis seems to understandably feel that as a candidate he has an obligation to debate regardless of the strategic considerations, so here are some thoughts that would serve him better than Never Back Down’s idiotic, too-cute-by-half advice to urge his competitors to “just leave [Trump] alone.”

• Hammer Donald: To the contrary, DeSantis needs to make Trump’s unwillingness to answer for his record a constant theme of the night. Connect every topic to a promise Trump broke or a task Trump botched. Contrary to whatever geniuses convinced him he had to focus on Joe Biden in the first few months of his campaign, this is a Republican primary with a frontrunner who’s deeply entrenched in voters’ default judgment. Uprooting what they think they know about Trump is the basic prerequisite to facing Biden (or a younger Democrat replacement). One of the reasons Trump is still so far ahead is the largely-unchallenged premise that he was a good president. He wasn’t. Let people know it.
• Brand the Also-Rans: Don’t get too bogged down in the particulars of why the other candidates shouldn’t be the nominee; instead challenge the premise that any of them are trying to be the nominee. Call out what they’re really doing: self-promoting with the country on the line when they know a crowded field is how Trump won the 2016 primary. Note that the ones angling for a job with Trump (like Vivek Ramaswamy) are perfectly fine with that outcome, while excoriating the ones who genuinely dislike Trump (Mike Pence, Chris Christie) for knowingly helping to bring about a Trump nomination instead of helping unify the party around the only real alternative. (Fortunately, DeSantis has already started making this argument.)
• Get More Direct: DeSantis’s legal background is obviously part of what makes him so good with details and effectively wielding executive power, but throughout the primary it’s also been a clear hindrance in how he communicates about complex subjects that need simple answers. Whether it’s pardoning Trump or supporting nationwide preborn protection, you need to frontload the correct answer (which for these examples is “YES”) and then offer whatever nuance or elaboration is required. One thing politicians never seem to realize is that evasiveness, whether intended or not, sounds like evasiveness to even the least politically astute listener.
• Lay Down the Stakes: connect Trump’s failings, the also-rans’ agendas, and every policy issue to the fact that nominating Trump means in all likelihood Democrats will win the general election, which in turn means a potential opportunity to enact a slate of legislation that would irrevocably cement their power and end America as we know it. Convey the gravity of the situation, that primary politics is not a game, and we don’t have the luxury of screwing this up. Drive home that amateur hour is over, the time for pseudo-patriot opportunists is done, and if we don’t grow up and unite to end the freakshow, we will lose everything we claim to be fighting for.