Archives for 2024

Bill and I were watching sports on TV yesterday when word reached us that DeSantis had suspended his campaign. We high-fived as if celebrating a touchdown. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means, if anything. But I keep coming back to this: Well, that was weird.

DeSantis and his epic flameout of a campaign are and were weird, but not in the stereotypical Florida sense of the word, e.g., weird like throwing a live gator through a drive-thru window.

Rather, DeSantis is a signpost in this weird moment in our political history, when buttoned-down Freedom Caucus-adjacent fascists are trying to co-opt lumpy Orange Sauron’s fake populism to accrue political power. Sometimes it works. J.D. Vance is now a U.S. Senator, for example.

And sometimes it doesn’t work, Ron DeSantis being the latest cautionary tale. But the thing is, he and J.D. and Senator Hawley, etc., are a type, and while it’s right and proper to celebrate when one of them flames out, I think we need an epic face-plant by their master to reduce the danger they pose to the republic to a manageable level.

For my money, David Roth at The Defector described Trump’s appeal and the type of scrawny, elitist fascist who hopes to leverage Orange Sauron for power as well as anyone ever has:

In place of conservatism’s worn nostrums about freedom-to and freedom-from, there’s just retributive violence and impunity; a gun brandished as an argument-ender at the supermarket or a truck accelerating toward a pod of protestors; the absolute right to turn in anyone who offends or just crowds you, and state agents standing by to do the dirty work from there. It is about who calls the cops on whom, and what they expect the cops to do when they arrive; its adherents are cop-callers and the self-deputized.

The challenge for the cynics and gremlins and adult libertarians running against Trump for the GOP nomination is that they also have to promise to do all this while, crucially, not being Trump himself—to sell the same rancid fantasy in a more compelling and presentable way than the dumpy golf priss that the fantasy’s adherents have made its hero and deliverer. How would one do that?

The ambitious aspiring genocidaires around Trump, who want to remake every institution around those vicious impulses, lack both Trump’s demented gravitas and his curdled charisma, but they have the parasitic instinct to know that he can get them where they want to go. They would still be around government if it weren’t for Trump, working in some vile congressman’s office or think tank and doing their level best to shovel as much hurt as possible onto the people they hate the most, but they would be nowhere near as close to being able to do it at the scale to which they aspire. They’re loyal to Trump in the same inextricable and fundamentally unreasoning way that a symptom might be considered loyal to a disease.

Erstwhile and once again Trump loyalist Ron DeSymptom ran a lousy campaign, but it was hamstrung from the beginning because the disease was also in the race. Voters who crave the disease — to extend the metaphor, let’s call it syphilis — aren’t going to vote for “genital lesions” when “syphilis” is right there on the same ballot. It really is that simple, I think.

Anyhoo, my hope is that his humiliating flop will end Ron DeSantis’s career in national politics forever. You never know, but I think that’s a real possibility because DeSantis is a peevish dick, and now that he’s stumbled, everyone is giving into the impulse to kick a fallen bully. Here’s a sample analysis in CNN:

Iowa revealed how ineffective his effort had been all along — his ground game, his message, his strategy, all exposed as a paper tiger and turning his candidacy into a punchline in Republican circles.

“Historic disaster,” said one veteran Republican fundraiser once hopeful of DeSantis’ chances. “JV team.”

Veteran GOP strategists Curt Anderson and Alex Castellanos called it the “Worst Republican Presidential Campaign Ever” in a blistering audit written for Politico that was devoured Friday by DeSantis allies and enemies alike.

Here’s Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell on the ignominious ending of DeSantis 2024:

It’s hard to overstate just how epic this collapse was.

Less than a year ago, Ron DeSantis was the next big thing. Wall Street loved him. So did the GOP faithful.

Polls suggested he was more popular among Republicans than Donald Trump. And just eight months ago, DeSantis had twice as much campaign cash.

But Ron DeSantis had a problem: Ron DeSantis.

The more he campaigned, the less people liked him — namely members of his own party. He was awkward, entitled and angry.

Anger is actually a quality some people crave in their politicians. But DeSantis was angry about weird things — like Disney World…

And by the time DeSantis tucked his tail and ate his own words Sunday, endorsing the very man he’d spent weeks debasing, he’d managed to do something his supporters never imagined — damage his own brand.

See, many politicians mount their first campaign for president without really expecting to win. Instead, they just want to introduce themselves to voters and boost their name ID for the next time. But DeSantis managed to leave the race worse than he started.

The Miami Herald editorial board noticed too (via HuffPo):

“It’s not just that he was steamrolled by Donald Trump,” the newspaper wrote. “DeSantis never appeared to want to save the GOP. He was more interested in making it a more ravenous, angrier and intolerant party. That worked for Trump, but didn’t work for the governor with all the charisma of burned toast.”

But while DeSantis’ campaign may be over, the damage he has done to Florida remains:

“Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be ‘Don’t say gay,’ woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars. These were efforts to appeal to Trump’s base but his supporters refused to leave the former president, especially after he was indicted.”

The newspaper said DeSantis could’ve made a play for a “more reasonable” form of conservatism to appeal to a broader range of Americans.

“Instead, he banked on exploiting divisions in our country. As he bows out, DeSantis leaves the Republican Party exactly as he found it, under Trump’s dominance,” the newspaper said.

Yep. And now he’s coming back to his day job, God help us. DeSantis ended his campaign on the same glitch-ridden platform where he launched it — the former Twitter — and his speech concluded with ominous words for those of us in the Sunshine State:

While this campaign has ended, the mission continues. Down here in Florida, we will continue to show the country how to lead.

We’ll see about that. Now that DeSantis has been exposed as a paper tiger, I doubt the corrupt oafs in the statehouse will keep sticking their necks out for him. With any luck, maybe some of the votes they took to bolster his disastrous campaign will come back to bite them on the ass. Maybe better people will emerge.

But no matter what happens in Florida, the Republican Party’s drive to extend Trump’s vicious campaign of dominance and retribution will go on, and there are dozens if not hundreds of DeSantis-like fascist creeps waiting in the wings for their shot. The only thing that can end the whole nauseating Trump circus is us showing up in droves in November, leaving nothing left for the hyper-ambitious sadists to inherit.

Open thread.

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