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.
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