DeSantis Acts, Trump Talks

Maybe a Trump candidacy that stands no chance in a general election is better for the country than a DeSantis one that does.

The impulse-driven Donald Trump said he would love to change libel laws in such a way that he could never get sued, but could sue any of his detractors. Of course, that was a pipe dream forwarded by a man with very little intellectual horsepower, and absolutely no discipline or substantive follow through.

Those negative attributes do not apply to Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

In his legislature, DeSantis has found willing accomplices to mug public education and free speech. He has taken unrequited Trumpian dreams and made them reality.

He should scare democracy loving people because unlike Trump, he is smart, educated, and disciplined. No flitting from target to target just hoping to land a potshot insult and moving on. No, this guy is serious, and Trump has paved his way. As he’s doing in Florida, he’ll try to impose an authoritarian state in the name of freedom, which most Americans won’t see as freedom.

Where Trump talks, DeSantis acts. Ban history? You bet. Chase drag queens out of public? Sure. Milton Berle is lucky his act was 70 years ago. DeSantis would have him jailed, and his Uber-popular TV show shamed into cancelation.

I worry less about the Performative Caucus that, like Trump, is more interested in fame than governing. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Mars), Lauren Boebert (R-Glock), Louis Gomert (R-1860), or Arizona’s Paul Gosar, a man so unlikeable, so reprehensibly racist, that his family begs voters to deny him.  

The ones to actually worry about are the educated professionals who know how to bend our democracy to their will. Christopher Rufo is the propagandist who turned the obscure law school curriculum Critical Race Theory into a catchall of evil. When his followers wish to sully any idea or person, they simply yell “CRT!” Now he’s DeSantis’s guy, and you can bet that he’ll vilify “woke” when he’s not  reconstituting the board of the New College, the former liberal arts school that he and the governor are rechristening as an ultra-religious/ultra-conservative school apparently intended to educate the DeSantis Youth. I can already see the cute brown uniforms.  

Russell Vought is the other seriously bad actor here. He was Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He has created the ironically named Center for Renewing America. What he really wants to renew is the ironclad rule of rich old white men. Don’t bet against him.

As David Brooks noted, there is the angry Trump populism that animates conservative talk radio, Fox news, and the myriad internet sites that are all focused on culture war issues and, as the man himself said, “retribution.” Then there are the sunny, business-forward conservatives like Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, who could easily wage culture way—they are well qualified, and will do so when politically necessary—but instead prefer to talk about their states’ economic growth.

Kemp has continued the tradition he inherited to make Atlanta and environs Hollywood East, and he brought the billion dollar Rivian truck plant home. His stated goal is to make Georgia “the electric mobility capital of America.” He’s all about green manufacturing. Not because it may help save the planet. You’ll never hear him utter the words climate and change next to each other, or even in the same galaxy. He’s a more traditional Republican who wants to shrink government and deregulate business. If women lose rights in the process, so be it.

Finally, you have Ron DeSantis. Something of an enigma to me. He’s Ivy-educated, and were he to talk business and Florida’s robust economy instead of culture war, he’d have Trump sweating like Rudy in front of an adult bookstore. But he is either convinced that mimicking Trump on all the hot buttons of their not-big-enough-to win-a-general-election coalition is a winner, or he’s hoping he has enough gas in the tank to runover Trump in the primaries, and tack back to the left for the general. Maybe he’s right.

Or maybe he’s just a mean-spirited, smart guy with the ways and means, and importantly, the discipline, to wrench the steering wheel hard-right and impose his history denialism, elected prosecutor firing, anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, anti-drag shows (but that’s just Republican chic now), anti-small “d” democracy and capital “D” Democrats, all in the name of fighting the woke, which at this moment in America is all of Gen Z, every Millennial, 90% of Gen X, and most baby-boomers. All told, the despised “woke” majority ranges from 60% pro-choice to 90% pro-gun safety legislation.

And one more word on Ukraine: Any American politician who has nice things to say about foreign dictators, hateful things to say about his fellow Americans, and seems to regard the brutal and unprovoked Russian invasion of sovereign Europe as a “territorial dispute,” will not get my vote.

©2023 Jon Sinton