Ron DeSantis’s choice to ship migrants from close to the Mexico border to the capital metropolis of California is at first look the most recent in a sequence of escalating clashes between the Florida governor and his Democratic counterpart, Gavin Newsom.

But the performative gambit within the early days of Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 presidential run is best understood as a gap bid to show to Republican main voters that he will be simply as a lot a provocateur, and each bit as incendiary, as former President Donald J. Trump.

For Mr. DeSantis, the flights illustrate the broader guess he has made that the animating power within the Republican Party at present has shifted from conservatism to confrontationalism. And that on this new period, nothing is extra elementary than choosing fights and making the fitting enemies, whether or not it’s the migrants who’ve slogged typically 1000’s of miles to slide via the border, the news media or the chief government of the most important blue state on the map.

Mr. DeSantis has used this playbook earlier than. He ordered up flights from the Texas border final 12 months to the symbolically liberal hamlet of Martha’s Vineyard, a stunt that drew precisely the outrage he sought. Those flights at the moment are a staple of his stump speech, often to cheers from the gang. His allies within the Florida Legislature earmarked $12 million of taxpayer cash into the state finances this 12 months for simply this goal.

“The easiest way to prove one’s tribal loyalty in 2020s America is by theatrically hating the other tribe,” mentioned Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and the previous president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

In current days, two constitution flights orchestrated by the DeSantis administration carried roughly three dozen migrants from a New Mexico airport to Sacramento. The migrants, who’re largely Venezuelan, mentioned that they had been recruited from exterior a shelter in El Paso, with guarantees of employment that California officers have mentioned amounted to deception. Mr. Newsom, the California governor who’s a possible future presidential contender himself, has recommended that the affair may benefit “kidnapping charges,” calling Mr. DeSantis in a tweet a “small, pathetic man.”

Mr. Moore mentioned he believed “that migrants and asylum seekers are created in the image of God and shouldn’t be mistreated or treated as political theater for anybody.” But he may additionally see the extra crass calculations that Mr. DeSantis is making in a polarized period the place politicians are most clearly outlined not by what they’re for, however who they’re towards.

“The one heresy that no tribe seems to allow is a refusal to hate the other tribe,” Mr. Moore mentioned.

Mr. DeSantis, who flew to Arizona on Wednesday for a border event, shouldn’t be a trailblazer on this regard. It was Mr. Trump who started his 2016 marketing campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, who promised to “build the wall” and later pitched a Muslim ban, making an “America First” method to immigration a central theme of the social gathering. And it was Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas who first started busing immigrants to blue cities and states final 12 months (an idea Mr. Trump floated as president in 2018 but never pursued). Mr. DeSantis later one-upped Mr. Abbott’s buses with the dramatic flights to Martha’s Vineyard, which at the moment are the topic of a federal class-action lawsuit.

At the demographic and geographic epicenter of Mr. DeSantis’s presidential candidacy is an effort to attraction to deeply conservative evangelical voters in Iowa, the place the Republicans’ 2024 nominating contest begins. Evangelical voters helped propel the Iowa victories of Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee within the final three open contests.

Yet the DeSantis marketing campaign and its allies see combating the left because the quickest technique to attraction to these voters moderately than overt shows of religiosity. “Christians aren’t looking for a savior to be a president, they already have one,” mentioned one DeSantis adviser, who was not approved to talk publicly to debate technique, explaining how Mr. Trump has dominated that voting bloc regardless of considerations about his ethical character.

Kevin Madden, who served as a prime adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, mentioned transporting migrants, nonetheless cynical, allowed Mr. DeSantis to agitate all the fitting individuals.

“He’s provoking Gavin Newsom,” Mr. Madden mentioned. “He’s provoking the most extreme liberal voices to attack him. He is provoking media voices. And that works to his favor because it endears him to the forces on the right who want to see a clash of political civilizations.”

Outrage sells. Campaign contributions have repeatedly surged to the fury retailers on the fitting, whether or not the politicians selling the lie that the 2020 election was stolen or the G.O.P. hard-liners who battled Representative Kevin McCarthy’s ascent to the House speakership. An “own the libs” mentality has come to drive, if not outline, the fitting on-line.

On the left, Mr. Newsom has sought to raise himself via his tussles with Mr. DeSantis, too. He ran a television advertisement in Florida attacking him final 12 months. He challenged him to a debate. He traveled this spring to the New College of Florida, a public liberal arts establishment the place Mr. DeSantis is engineering a right-wing intellectual takeover. In his private Twitter account, Mr. Newsom has slammed Mr. DeSantis by title at least 20 times.

“I think I’m being generous — ‘small and pathetic’ — very generous,” Mr. Newsom mentioned in an interview on NBC’s “Today Show” broadcast on Wednesday. He accused Mr. DeSantis of utilizing migrants as “pawns,” including, “He’s just weakness masquerading as strength.”

Mr. Newsom’s new PAC has been working a rotation of on-line fund-raising advertisements that assault Mr. DeSantis. “In my book, a bully and a coward doesn’t deserve to be the leader of the free world,” Mr. Newsom says of Mr. DeSantis in a video advert that started working on Facebook on Wednesday.

Mr. DeSantis’s round-table dialogue in Arizona on border safety was a authorities occasion underwritten by taxpayers, not his marketing campaign. After days of thriller, Mr. DeSantis’s administration took credit score for the Sacramento flights on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he didn’t point out Mr. Newsom by title, although he mentioned “sanctuary jurisdictions” had “incentivized” unlawful immigration.

Then Mr. DeSantis shifted to choose one other struggle with President Biden. “I don’t know how you can just sit there and let the country be overrun with millions and millions of people coming illegally,” Mr. DeSantis mentioned.

Mr. DeSantis has develop into skilled at agitating the fitting’s boogeymen. He as soon as known as Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s main infectious illness skilled, a “little elf” who wanted to be chucked “across the Potomac.” And when Mr. DeSantis’s motives are questioned by reporters, his snapbacks have been shortly packaged and posted on social media in hopes of producing viral hits.

If he had been to develop into president, Mr. DeSantis has made plain he would use the White House’s powers to the fullest. He is fond of claiming that though he first received the governorship in 2018 with barely 50 % of the vote, that victory got here with 100% of the chief authority.

As governor, he proudly used the ability of the state to overrule native governments, ousting a prosecutor and prohibiting faculty districts from imposing masks mandates. Such actions are a departure from the limited-government conservatism of yesteryear. His allies say it’s a vivid sign to voters that Mr. DeSantis will leverage the powers of presidency to battle their enemies, at a second when many Republicans really feel that their values and nation are beneath siege.

Cesar Conda, a former chief of employees to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida who, twenty years in the past, served as the highest home coverage adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, mentioned that “Ronald Reagan would be rolling over in his grave using taxpayer dollars” to fly migrants from one faraway state to a different.

“DeSantis’s move is part of a growing strain in conservatism, endorsed by younger conservatives, to aggressively use the power and resources of government to achieve — or coerce — policy goals,” Mr. Conda mentioned. “The ‘less government, lower taxes, more freedom’ mantra of conservatism is becoming quaint and old-fashioned, unfortunately.”

Shawn Hubler and Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.