Clip: Can any of the Republican presidential candidates beat Trump for the 2024 nomination?

William Brangham: Let`s pivot to the people who would love to replace President Biden. I mean, the race for the Republican presidential nomination stepped up this week with former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attacking each other on the campaign trail. DeSantis officially kicked off his campaign in Iowa, where he took aim at Trump, who is the current frontrunner.

Ron DeSantis: At the end of the day, leadership is not about entertainment. It`s not about building a brand. It is about results.

William Brangham: For his part, Trump criticized DeSantis for saying it would take the next Republican president two terms, something former President Trump legally cannot fulfill to get the country headed in the right direction.

Donald Trump: It will take me six months to have it totally the way it was. If it takes eight years to turn this around, then you don`t want him.

William Brangham: As this frontrunner feud intensified, the Republican field is about to get even more crowded. Former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, both one-time Trump allies now turned adversaries, are set to join the race as well next week.

And all of this comes amid new reporting that seemingly further chips away at Trump`s defense of how he handled all those classified documents. So, a lot going on there.

Asma, Ron DeSantis, we are now seeing him out on the campaign trail for the first time, him sparring with Donald Trump. DeSantis has been thought by many as the obvious, quote/unquote, main rival to Trump. Does it still seem that way?

Asma Khalid: I think it does. I mean, part of that is public opinion polling that has shown that. But also part of it, I think, is just the dynamic between these two men. Clearly, the former President Donald Trump sees the Florida governor as his main rival, just hearing the level of sort of attacks.

William Brangham: Right, he`s doing this to no one else.

Asma Khalid: Right, exactly. So, clearly, he sees that rivalry. I mean, one of the things I think that the Florida governor needs to try to do to distinguish himself is really build on this idea of electability. It`s what you often hear him present. I think it`s what you hear his aides suggest is that he is more electable than Donald Trump.

I think that is a very difficult argument for him to make. But perhaps you got a glimpse of it this week because he was out doing some degree of retail campaigning, right? You saw him out with his wife telling these stories about being a dad. Those are stories that Donald Trump isn`t really able to tell in the same way, that, look at me, I`m just like you, right?

William Brangham: I mean, Leigh Ann, to this point that Asma is making is that DeSantis is arguing that the GOP has to embrace the idea of winning and he keeps bringing up 2020 and 2024 as digs at Donald Trump. Is that argument, though, resonant with voters?

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Well, some Republicans in Congress anyway, would even also bring up 2018 and 2022, as well as why Republicans have lost because of Donald Trump. It`s really difficult. I mean, there is still no one like Donald Trump, who has such a handle on the Republican base. And so for his base, the best way to win is Donald Trump. But he has proven over and over again that he has been unable to win national elections.

The difficult thing for Ron DeSantis is no one can be meaner and more effective on their attacks than Donald Trump. And Ron DeSantis, who is hesitant to directly attack Donald Trump, unless he`s, as we saw this week, only when he`s talking to the press, not to voters, it`s a really challenging position.

And I`m going to go one step further in the sense that Ron DeSantis is also not willing to talk about January 6th or the 2020 election as well. And that is a very clear way to draw contrast with the former president. And if he`s not willing to do that, what is the difference between the two, just a less better Donald Trump, maybe.

William Brangham: Right? It`s a very tricky path you`re describing. Nikole, we are going to see two new entrants next week, perhaps more, Chris Christie and former Vice President Mike Pence. Do you have a good sense as to what they think of as their argument for why they belong in this race and why they have a shot at this?

Nikole Killion: Well, I think Chris Christie has made clear he`s the anti-Trump. And so that is the lane he has kind of carved from day one, even when he started putting some rumblings out that he may get into the race.

William Brangham: To be the pugilist who goes directly at the president, unlike former president, unlike anybody else.

Nikole Killion: That and that he is not the former president. I mean, he`s willing to make that distinction. He`s willing to pull those punches where some of the other candidates have not.

With respect to Mike Pence, I mean, I think it remains to be seen, because we`ve seen him kind of toe the line between aligning himself with the policies of the Trump administration, but also putting some distance on issues like January 6th and others.

So, I think it will really be interesting when we get to that first debate in August to see how much the gloves come off between all of these candidates.

Asma Khalid: And who`s on the stage also.

William Brangham: Right. What is your sense of the calculus? Are they all just waiting for a Trump implosion? Is that --

Peter Baker: I mean, there are two ways to win here, right? One is to actually take Trump down. The other is to wait for Trump to take Trump down. And so far, nobody seems to be doing the first part of it very well because Trump is doing quite handily in the polls.

So, they`re waiting for Jack Smith. They`re waiting for Georgia. They`re waiting to see what happens here. If he gets a second indictment, a third indictment, a fourth indictment, does that change the calculus for Republican voters who like Trump, but say, I actually agree with him on most of these policies, I want to do the things he wants to do, but maybe there`s just too much baggage here?

And that`s why DeSantis won`t go after him, because DeSantis doesn`t want to alienate the Trump voters. He wants to be there the moment Trump implodes, if he does, and say, okay, guys, I`m here for you. Come on board. It`s an if. It`s a gamble. Nobody knows. He did better after the first indictment than he did, you know, than then it was doing before that. But questions whether it all adds up into a cumulative baggage that kind of finally weighs them down.

William Brangham: Asma, Peter is talking about that one potential liability for the former president is the looming idea of these indictments. And there were these new revelations this week that that chip away, it seems, at Trump`s argument that he handled the classified documents in an above board way. But is it your sense that those -- let`s say, another indictment were to come from Jack Smith or from the Georgia elections case, does that really dent Trump in a meaningful way, or do you think his primary voters would forgive that?

Asma Khalid: The primary voters I met leading up to the midterms, because I was actually down in Florida doing some reporting when the original tranche of classified documents was discovered at Mar-a-Lago, did not seem bothered by this. I think, thus far, just looking at how he has held a steady lead in all of the polls, being the frontrunner, I don`t know that there`s any indication.

So, I mean, it is an interesting hypothetical. If there are additional indictments, will that, over time, build up and make people question him? Perhaps, but so far, I don`t see any evidence that anything that the former president has done has actually led people to question whether or not they want to vote for him, at least within the sort of die hard based supporters.

William Brangham: Right. Is that your sense as well?

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Yes. I mean, the challenge is that Donald Trump has done such an effective job at convincing his supporters that these investigations are nonsense, are witch hunts, that the 2020 election was in fact stolen, that it was a bunch of peaceful people on January 6th. And so why would a deep state government investigation and indictment change any of their minds?

And so I`m super skeptical that it`s going to have any real impact on in the Republican primary. The only way it could is if he can`t maybe get on the campaign trail because he`s spending his time in court and he can`t visit these primary states, and maybe it will convince some Republicans not to vote for him. But conventional wisdom is out the window. We`ve been talking about for a long time about Donald Trump.

William Brangham: Right. I mean, Nikole, as Leigh Ann, there is such a huge slice of the GOP primary base that does think that January 6th or has been led to believe that that wasn`t such a big deal and that the election was somehow tainted. And it makes it very, very difficult, it seems, for anyone who doesn`t toe that line to punch through.

Nikole Killion: Yes. I mean, I think that`s a big part of it. I know spending a lot of time in Georgia specifically, and obviously one of those investigations, the investigation in Fulton County has to deal with election interference, but a lot of conservative voters there and during the midterms told me they do buy into that, and they do think that there were some shenanigans going on during the election.

So, to your point, yes, it`s hard to break through. How do you convince those voters? But I would also argue that Republicans as a whole, I think, are trying to be very forward-looking. I think there`s a lot of reticence to look back at January 6th, to look back at 2020. It`s really about looking -- and I think, too, to your earlier question about Mike Pence and some of these other candidates, I think it`s about trying to define how the party is moving forward. What are those issues that are key to the base? What are the issues of importance as we go forward, as opposed to re-litigating things in the past?

So, I think that is the direction that you will see the campaign going in terms of how candidates litigate their arguments to voters. But that being said, Democrats, I think, continue to rely on this argument about democracy. So, with respect to the president`s messaging going forward, I mean, certainly, yes, it`s about the economy, it`s about reproductive rights, but I think that issue of democracy will also play big in this upcoming election, but maybe more so on the Democratic side than the Republican side.

Peter Baker: And to be clear, I don`t want to leave that I was thinking, by the way, that he will implode. I want to say that`s one scenario. I agree with your skepticism. The other thing --

William Brangham: And you`re not holding a crystal ball out here tonight?

Peter Baker: We should be very humble about making predictions when it comes to Donald Trump.

I would say the one thing he has it to his advantage, as we see in these new candidates coming in, is a split field, right? That`s how he got ahead so conveniently in 2016, because there were 16 other candidates, they didn`t ever coalesce their opposition to him. We`re seeing something like that right now. The question is whether they will coalesce by the end of the year when the voting starts.

William Brangham: And I think, Peter, the point that Nikole is making here, too, is that if you`re on a debate stage and Donald Trump is there, you can`t avoid those questions about 2020. And so Pence and Haley and Asa Hutchinson and Christie and all of them are going to have to speak their mind about whether they thought that election was stolen, whether they thought January 6th and all the defendants ought to be pardoned, as Trump has argued. And that`s going to put a lot of them on the spot and maybe in the crosshairs of GOP primary voters.

Peter Baker: Yes, no, absolutely. In fact, most of these people are on record saying they don`t think the election was stolen, or at least giving that indication, right? Obviously, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie have said that, Asa Hutchinson.

DeSantis is kind of having it both ways, right? When he says Trump is a loser, what he means is you really did lose in 2020, even though he`s not saying it directly to the voters that way. And so we`ll see how he handles that on the debate stage.

William Brangham: Right. Last question, and we saw President Biden last night after he was giving a speech at the Air Force Academy stumble and fall. And it was hard not to notice that that was immediately picked up on across conservative media. Donald Trump and his town hall last night on Fox News talked about it at length.

How much of that of President Biden`s age and mental acuity is going to focus by the GOP? Two seconds left.

Asma Khalid: I would say it`s not just a concern of the GOP. You hear from Democratic voters who are concerned about his age. The question I would say is who`s on the Republican side because, Donald Trump is not particularly younger.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: I would completely agree with Asma. And then it brings into question about Kamala Harris too. I think that it could be a liability for the president and 82 might not be so bad, but people think about 86 four years later.

William Brangham: And the same?

Nikole Killion: I think so. I mean, I think it was interesting that Donald Trump said his fall wasn`t inspiring, but he also referenced his own tripping down the stage. So, I mean, look, it happens to everybody.

Peter Baker: It is the essential tension for Biden right now. On the same day he got this big deal through, he also stumbles and falls, his great advantage of being seasoned, the great disadvantage of age.

William Brangham: Thank you all so much for being here for joining us on Friday and thanks to all of you for joining us as well.