The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP comes from his Florida neighbor, Governor Ron DeSantis, who may be more MAGA than the MAGA king himself. jonathanchait writes
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People who do not ingest large amounts of conservative media may have difficulty comprehending the extent of the adulation both the Trumpist and the Trump-skeptical wings of the party have lavished on DeSantis. On a daily basis, the right-wing press churns out stories with headlines like “The Promise of Ron DeSantis,” “Could Gov.
It is crucial to understand that the critique of Trump that prevails among Republican officials is far narrower than the one proffered by Democrats or Never Trumpers. They don’t object to Trump’s racism, corruption, lying, or contempt for democratic norms, except to the extent that these qualities hurt the party’s brand. What irritates, instead, is Trump’s constant disregard for basic political self-preservation.
This thesis perfectly described the next contested primary that happened. The 2012 Republican nominating contest featured a succession of flamboyant right-wing populists — Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Gingrich — who would enthrall the base and shoot up in the polls only to collapse as if pulled down by some gravitational force detectable solely by political science.
Photo: David A. Grogan/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images ; Joe Raedle/Getty Images ; Federic J Brown/AFP via Getty Images ; Joe Raedle/Getty Images ; CNN/Youtube ; Storms Media for Delray Beach Market/MediaPunch/Shutterstock . The Republican elites rallying to DeSantis are calculating that his synthetic version of Trumpism will serve as an adequate substitute.
A common assumption of mainstream-media analysis of DeSantis is that he is merely pandering to Trump and his supporters and, as a graduate of Yale and Harvard, is too smart to actually believe what he is saying. This is a failure of imagination. DeSantis developed reactionary suspicions of democracy before Trump ever came along, which positioned him perfectly to straddle the elite-base divide within his party.
Still, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers is much more interesting than a typical partisan screed. Its author, who majored in history and spent a year teaching the subject at a tony boarding school, has clearly given a great deal of thought to the book’s thesis: that Obama’s agenda of raising taxes on the rich and spending more money on the non-rich is an attack on the Constitution.
DeSantis treats any further expansion of government as a mortal threat to the Constitution. Sentences like “Obamanomics represents a dramatic departure from the nation’s founding principles” and “Obama’s quest to ‘fundamentally transform the United States of America’ represents the type of political program that the Constitution was designed to prevent” are found in nearly every chapter. The word redistribution and its variants appear more than 150 times.
DeSantis’s skepticism of public-health authorities paid economic and political dividends, at least for a while. During the 2020–21 academic year, when most states stuck with remote learning, Florida opened its schools, a position even Democrats belatedly recognized as correct. He has used COVID as a stage to pick successful fights with the media, which has sometimes overreached in its criticism of his pandemic policy.
Trump’s genuine ignorance and limited vocabulary allowed him to effortlessly channel the Republican base’s contempt for the educated elite. DeSantis has to work at it. Last fall, he mockingly cited a Wall Street Journal article on the declining number of men attending college. “I guess there was a decline in the number of men, the percentage of men going to college or whatever,” he told his audience. “And they acted like this was a bad thing.
DeSantis has appeared undaunted, tearing into a reporter who quoted Democrats who called it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill before it was signed. This allowed him to highlight, once again, his martyrdom at the hands of the media without having to address the more serious objections to the bill.
DeSantis, who was elected governor at the same time the initiative passed, acted quickly to nullify it once in office. Republicans pushed through a law requiring former felons to pay off any outstanding fines or court debt before they could vote. At least three-quarters of eligible voters owe court debt, and of those, the vast majority can’t pay it back.
The incipient contest broke into public view in December. It began when DeSantis appeared on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, who asked if he had gotten a booster shot. DeSantis evaded the question and changed the subject to his fight against vaccine requirements. A couple of weeks later, Pushaw announced that DeSantis was refusing to disclose his status as a matter of “medical privacy.”
Meanwhile, the most loyal Trumpist corners of the conservative media denied the entire premise that DeSantis and Trump were in conflict. American Greatness, an online magazine invented in response to the Trump campaign and premised on turning his slogans into a political program, insisted that “the New York Times story on the Trump-DeSantis feud is kayfabe” .
What a DeSantis-led Republican Party would look like is perhaps best captured in his response to the claims that the 2020 election was stolen. DeSantis began by playing the familiar role of Trump defender, complaining the day after the election about Fox News’ decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden.
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