DeSantis Is Finally Starting To Take Some Tepid Swings At Señor Trumpanzee

Maybe I need to watch this Club for Growth video again. It’s an attack on Trump… but I don’t exactly understand it. It seems discombobulated… incohate. I get the basic point— Trump (and Biden) are going to harm seniors by cutting their Social Security by 23% in the next 10 years. I guess Trump might have some kind cockamamie plan like that— who knows— but I’m certain Biden doesn’t. So… who knows? Maybe it’ll work for GOP primary voters. They’re all crackpots anyway. Here, watch it yourself:

But is that any crazier or dishonest than DeSantis telling Glenn Beck that Trump "did great for three years, but when he turned the country over to Fauci in March of 2020, that destroyed millions of people’s lives?” I hate to defend Trump but DeSantios was lying. “I think when people look back, that 2020 year was not a good year for the country as a whole. It was a situation where Florida started to stand alone, so I think that that’s [an] important contrast.”

On Twitter, the governor’s team and allies spent the day litigating the early days of the virus in a back-and-forth with Trumpworld. The “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account posted a throwback video in the afternoon of Trump defending shutting down the country in March 2020, while the “Trump War Room” engaged in a contentious back-and-forth with DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw over the governor’s own early restrictions and mortality rate in comparison to New York, with allied pundits popping in to throw chairs.

“What specifically was the best aspect of Cuomo and New York’s Covid response?” Pushaw tweeted at one point, complete with a meme drawing of a masked figure with needles in its body asking to “govern me harder daddy.” The Trump team's response began: “First of all, nobody wants to be your daddy.”

DeSantis and his allies have been telegraphing COVID will be key to his campaign for months, so its appearance is not a surprise.

That he hit Trump with it so early is more notable: A number of other Republican presidential hopefuls have been more reluctant to offer up direct contrasts with the former president. DeSantis’ initial launch events on Wednesday largely ignored Trump. If today is any indication, things against the two front runners could heat up quickly, and certainly long before they meet on a debate stage (if Trump attends).

And while the COVID battle took center stage, DeSantis made clear Thursday he’d try to get to Trump’s right on other issues as well. In an interview with New Hampshire radio host Jack Heath, the Florida governor accused Trump of “moving to the left,” pointing to Trump’s attacks on him for not supporting a bill that would have traded legal status for DREAMers (an “immigration amnesty” as DeSantis put it) for a border wall. He also mentioned the “almost $8 trillion in debt in just four years” he racked up as president. In an interview with Dana Loesch, he criticized as “unconstitutional” Trump’s 2018 call for red flag laws that “take the guns first, go through due process second.”

Where was Trump during this campaign’s very online start? Touching grass, literally: He hit the greens at his golf club in Virginia.

“He’s very disloyal, but he’s got no personality,” Trump told reporters in between holes. “And if you don’t have personality, politics is a very hard business.”

Earlier this week, Clarence Lusane, writing for Informed Consent, noted that “There is remarkably little difference between Trump and his main challengers for the presidential nomination when it comes to the politics and policies of the contemporary Republican Party. Take Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. For much of the last year, the mainstream media focused its attention on a potential cage match between a resurgent Trump and the now politically deflating DeSantis. It was the undisciplined populist versus the inflexible ideologue, the former president’s ability to articulate the most dangerous far-right ideas against DeSantis’s proven ability to actually implement them.”

For many on the left and in the progressive world, the debate has been over which of them would be worse, which would be quicker to destroy the country. Would DeSantis’s less chaotic approach ultimately be worse than that of the scandal-magnet Trump? Would a growing list of potential indictments benefit or harm Trump? Who would prevail in the battle of the brands— Make America Great Again (MAGA) or Make Florida America (MFA)?

In the end, the differences between the two of them are likely to prove superficial indeed. In the areas where Americans would be most severely affected, there’s hardly a fly’s hair of separation between them. Beyond the fact that both are mercurial, petty, narcissistic bigots, as well as textbook definitions of toxic masculinity, it’s in the realm of politics and public policy where they might take somewhat different roads that, unfortunately, would head this country toward the very same destination: an undemocratic, authoritarian state whose foundational creed would be racism and unrelenting bigotry.

A dive into the policy wasteland of both reveals a distinctly unsurprising convergence. DeSantis has become infamous for the anti-woke initiatives that have roiled Florida’s education system from elementary school to college. Books have been (figuratively and perhaps literally) burned, teachers fired, school boards overthrown, and— from English and history to math and social science— curriculums revamped to fit a right-wing agenda. Almost singlehandedly, the governor has pushed through “anti-woke” policies and signed legislation aimed at reconstructing the state’s education system from top to bottom.

It should be recalled, however, that Trump was no slouch when it came to attacking wokeness. On September 4, 2020, he ordered the White House Office of Management and Budget to issue a memorandum that directed federal agencies “to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda” that might suggest the United States is a racist country. The goal was to cut funding and cancel contracts related to programs or training supposedly employing such concepts.

In September 2020, with only two months left in office, in a move likely meant to counter the actions of DeSantis, Trump launched a “1776 Commission” whose purpose was to develop a curriculum that would promote a “patriotic education” about race and the nation’s history. This was a pathetic effort to refute the New York Times’s “1619 Project” that argued slavery and racism were central to the birth of the nation, a theory that has driven conservatives into a frenzied state of panic.

Cynically, that commission issued its “1776 Report” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day— January 18, 2021— only two days before Trump left office in humiliation. It would be soundly criticized for its host of inaccuracies, its right-wing ideological bent, and even plagiarism that whitewashed American history, its founders, and their racism. A second Trump administration would undoubtedly go all in to put DeSantis in the shade by presenting a distinctly falsified, though politically useful version of that history.

DeSantis’s ideological opposition to abortion is in sync with Trump’s transactional one. While some GOP big names are calling for a national ban, both DeSantis and Trump are trying to find a sweet spot where they can build support, especially among evangelical extremists, while still retaining some possibility of winning educated white suburban women. Unlikely as that is, in a distinctly cowardly move, DeSantis signed his extreme Florida anti-abortion law late on a Thursday night behind closed doors, while Trump continues to fume and worry (legitimately) about paying the cost for losing women voters in a general election.

DeSantis loves to highlight the work of his Gestapo-like election police unit as his contribution to enforcing “voter integrity.” Established in 2022, the unit operates out of Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security (OECS) and includes a statewide prosecutor. It will undoubtedly shock no one that most of those arrested in its initial months were overwhelmingly people of color. Virtually all of them were dealing with a confusing election system that had restored voting rights to some but not all ex-felons. (That system had, in fact, actually issued voter ID cards to former felons who weren’t eligible.) DeSantis proudly praised the arrests, no matter that most of them were later tossed out of court. In fact, local prosecutors refused hundreds of OECS referrals.

In terms of voting rights, though, has DeSantis topped Trump’s effort to throw out millions of black votes, attack black election workers, and have his Justice Department support every voter-suppression policy passed by GOP state legislatures? Not yet, he hasn’t. And don’t forget that Trump also created an ill-fated, disingenuous Presidential Commission on Election Integrity within months of taking office in 2017. Its real purpose was to collect state election data and weaponize it against Democratic voters. That effort, however, proved so clumsily fraudulent that even Republican-controlled states refused to submit information and the Commission was dissolved within seven months. Six years later, with the clear aim of suppressing Democratic and black voters, Trump has been calling for same-day-only in-person voting with paper ballots.

And finally, don’t forget how both Trump and DeSantis (as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbott) have brazenly celebrated the street violence perpetrated by armed white men. Trump hosted Kyle Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago in November 2021. Rittenhouse had shot and killed Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, while wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, during racial-justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. He became a cause célèbre of the far-right media and the MAGA movement and was eventually found not guilty, leading to Trump’s invitation. The former president has also loudly pledged to pardon charged or convicted violent January 6th insurrectionists.

Not to be outdone, DeSantis recently praised Daniel Penny who killed Jordan Neely, a slim, young black man having a mental health crisis on a New York City subway car. Penny, a trained ex-Marine, applied a chokehold for many minutes. Neely’s death was ruled a homicide and Penny has now been arrested for it. Far-right Republicans were quick to issue statements of solidarity and to support fundraising for his legal case. DeSantis referred to Penny as a “good Samaritan” and shared a link to his fundraising page, while somehow associating the incident with that number one billionaire scoundrel for conservatives, George Soros.

By their behavior and words, Trump and DeSantis provide a permission zone for white nationalist violence.

In the end, the two of them aren’t so much highlighting their differences as competing to see who can be the most extreme, issue by issue. As Trump made clear in his recent CNN town hall— functionally, a Trump rally— he has no intention of tacking towards the middle. Quite the opposite, as he heads for Election Day 2024, his hurricane of lies will only grow more extreme, shameless, and dangerous, while the GOP base cheers him on.

DeSantis has, so far, been reduced to running against Trump on the issue of “electability.” He claims Trump can’t win in a general election– possibly true (if the economy doesn’t go into recession)– and is calling on GOP voters to put aside their Trumpian passions and be more practical. Essentially, this is the same argument being made by other soon-to-be also-rans like former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Trump Vice President Mike Pence, and Senator Tim Scott. They all cower when it comes to really going after Trump, becoming instead the political equivalents of passive-aggressive 13-year-olds. Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who may join the race and has gone from frenemy to all-out never-Trumper, has shown little divergence from the former president’s most basic policies.

What distinguishes DeSantis from the rest of the pack and aligns him more fully with The Donald is that they both have an urge to be cruel for no other reason than that they can be. Few political leaders have ever been quite as thin-skinned as Trump. His pettiness is legendary, while it clearly gives him pleasure to inflict pain on others. DeSantis has a similar personality. His treatment of immigrants, the way he describes LGBTQ individuals, and his press releases and speeches against any perceived opponent are filled to the brim with invective and venom.

DeSantis’s Make Florida America, or MFA, is a genuine threat and his own version of a MAGA move. A Trump or DeSantis administration would ensure at least four long years of brutal retaliation and murderous policies through the prism of white nationalist Great Replacement rhetoric.

Sadly, the problem isn’t just Trump— or rather it’s not only Trump— or DeSantis either. The horror of our moment is the way the base of the contemporary Republican Party has come to embrace the most extreme views and policies around.

So, here’s a final question for this difficult moment: In a forest of fascism, does it matter which tree is the tallest?