reflectivepundit

Trump Clone DeSantis is an even Greater Threat than the Original

By Brigitte L. Nacos

While I took a healthy break from following political news developments on a 7/24 basis during the last several weeks, I could not miss that media figures and their sources have become increasingly obsessed with reporting on alternatives to Donald Trump, most of all Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Some pundits have even given advice on how DeSantis should compete against his one-time mentor. But if the pundits expected that the Florida Governor would finally come out swinging at Trump and give the media an opportunity to dramatize the beginning of a bruising battle between the two competitors, the ill-fated Twitter Space announcement was a disappointment. DeSantis did not mention Trump’s name. Not once.

At this point, Trump has a healthy lead in opinion polls ahead of second-place DeSantis—all other declared and undeclared candidates are polling in modest single-digit numbers. Previous campaigns have shown that the early survey results can drastically change over time. What individual candidates do or fail to do matters but so do unforeseen developments and events (Perhaps the preponderance of Trump’s legal problems?).

For now, news reporting on the DeSantis campaign seems quite benign. And the commentariat focuses on the expected battle between the quasi-incumbent Trump and the challenger DeSantis. So far, though, almost all pundits failed to ponder the substance of the two politicians’ agenda and whether DeSantis would be a less threatening president than Trump. An exception was Gail Collins of the New York Times who said earlier this month in a published conversation with Bret Stephens, “If I was locked up in a room and forced to choose between DeSantis and Trump, I’d beat my head against the wall and then pick The Donald.”

I agree with Collins.

Both men are power-hungry narcissists with strong authoritarian, indeed fascist traits manifested in their admiration for strongmen and their plan to expand their own executive powers---if they win next year. The socially challenged, super-tense and angry looking and sounding DeSantis lacks Trump’s relaxed reality show personality. But whereas the political opportunist Trump changes his positions or forgets about them in the chaos he tends to create, DeSantis is a hardcore ideologue with Far-Right principles and the discipline and lack of empathy to adopt extreme and inhumane laws and enforce them. This he has shown relentlessly in Florida. And now he promises to bring the same “Blueprint Florida” to the rest of America. In the Twitter announcement show he spoke repeatedly about “woke” threats, such as the “woke mob” and “woke mind virus.” I assume, his banning of books and freedoms of certain expression comes in reaction to what he called last night “woke ideology.” Whatever that is.

The ruthless culture war that DeSantis is fighting in his Floridian empire has impressed moneymen in the powerful White Christian Nationalism movement. While they love Trump for all he has done for their reactionary agenda, they now want Trumpism without Trump to defeat Joe Biden and the rest of evil Democrats next year. Their super PAC has gathered hundreds of thousands of dollars to guarantee that DeSantis will be well financed throughout the primary season.

DeSantis is as arrogant as or perhaps more arrogant than Trump. Whereas it took the formation of the MAGA movement and the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy theory for Trump to give his nod to his supporters’ claim that he is the “The Chosen One,” yesterday’s DeSantis ad claimed that God made this fighter and sent him to govern.

Thus, Never Trump and Never DeSantis. The clone is an even greater threat than the original.

CNN Offers Donald Trump Once Again Free Propaganda Time

Brigitte L. Nacos

CNN has offered and Donald Trump accepted the cable network’s invitation to a May 10^th townhall meeting in New Hampshire 18 months before the 2024 presidential elections and more than 9 months before the start of the primary season. The rationale for the deal is clear: With ratings down, CNN expects from Trump’s performance a huge audience and great media interest, while Trump wants to show Fox News that he has alternative means to spread his propaganda.

Free mainstream media.

Although there are two other declared contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump will be the only one in the 60-minute show that will be moderated by CNN morning show co-host, Kaitlan Collins. Some Republican and Independent audience members will get an opportunity to ask Trump questions.  

In 2015 and 2016, CNN was instrumental in over-covering Donald Trump’s toxic campaign performances and bringing the outrageous and scandalous news about the TV reality star turned presidential candidate to American and global audiences. The payoff came in form of  high ratings, high commercial rates, and healthy profits.

It seems that the CNN bosses have forgotten the frequent attacks on the network, its star correspondents and moderators by first-time candidate and later president Trump. They also must have forgotten that Donald Trump plotted with others to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and incited the breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 by his supporters.

For years, Trump called the mainstream media “the enemy of the American people” and news organizations and individual journalists “liars.” That is an old trick of autocratic strongmen who violate the laws and conventions of liberal democracy. Not for the common interest but their own corrupt interests.

CNN’s bosses should know better. After all, the network was high up on Trump’s hate-the-press list that encouraged MAGA fanatics to threaten journalists covering Trump’s rallies.

Again and unfortunately profit imperatives matter more than the journalistic ethics rules of a free press. 

Nikki Haley’s “Softer” Touch: Posing with an Attack Gun

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, UN Ambassador during part of the Trump presidency, and now declared candidate for the GOP’s presidential nomination, runs as member of “a new generation to lead us into the future.” In the early stages of her candidacy, she appealed particularly for the support of female Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere. Yet, if anyone hoped that a woman as alternative to candidate Trump and potential male competitors would take a softer approach to her party’s outrage politics, she already dashed those hopes. For once, Trump may be right in calling her “overly ambitious.”

Like her onetime boss and now fellow-candidate, she wants to please the core of extremist Republican primary voters, many of them part of America’s deadly gun culture. In the midst of a mass shooting crisis in this country and nearly daily incidents in which children and adults are killed in public places and their own homes, Haley tweeted a photo showing her with an attack weapon with her finger on the trigger and the caption, “Making sure our military has the equipment they need to keep us safe is a priority…” Under the guise of supporting the

military candidate Haley promoted the very attack guns that can be bought and carried in most blue states. She also thanked the manufacturer of the gun she held and a gun-rights organization. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire shortly after the mass shooting in a school of Nashville, Tennessee, Haley rejected any gun-control measures. Instead, she assured fellow-Republicans, “Everybody wants to talk about gun control. My thing is, I don't want to take away your ability to protect yourself until they do those things that protect those kids." She said it is okay to have metal detectors in schools.

To emphasize the generational gap between herself (she is 51 years old) and the two heavy weights for 2024, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Haley called for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians 75-years old. But although Trump will be 77-years old in June, Haley exempts the former president from her “old age” campaign attacks on Joe Biden, who is four years older than Trump and will be 81-years old in November.

Many voters, Democrats and Republicans, are uncomfortable with the advanced age of both Biden and Trump along with the old guard in the Congress. Thus, it is quite legitimate to discuss the age of candidates for the highest offices in the land.

The question is, how to frame such discussions. And Haley has not come up with right answer. Instead, her public statement that it is unlikely for the Biden to live until he is 86 years old and that therefore a vote for Biden in 2024 will be a vote for Kamala Harris is as shameful as her mandatory pro-gun photo on Twitter.

But as the great Irish writer Finton O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Books on Trump’s current legal problems and by extension the political culture the former president created, “the shameless cannot be shamed.”