DeSantis-- Probably Much Worse Than You Imagine

I don’t know anybody rooting for Ron DeSantis to win the Republican presidential nomination. But I know a lot of people who are rooting for Trump to lose. Unfortunately, those two things are probably the same. Trump is the worst president in American history. DeSantis would probably be much worse. On Friday, writing for Esquire, Jeff VanderMeer noted that “As Ron DeSantis provides safe harbor for oppression in Florida and exports bad policy across the country, it's clear that he represents an existential threat to American democracy— even if he fails to become president.” The title of his piece was even more provocative: Ron DeSantis Is A Man Of No Qualities. I wish it were true. But a man with no qualities, doesn’t take a classic swing state that he won in 2018 narrowly— 4,076,186 (49.6%) to 4,043,723 (49.2%)— to a near landslide 4 years later— 4,614,307 (59.4%) to 3,106,328 (40.0%). In 2018 a little-known Democrat won 14 counties— including all the big ones. In 2020 a former governor as well known as DeSantis won just 5— and missed most of the big ones. That’s something.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that DeSantis “is actively preparing a run for president in 2024, even as he delays a formal announcement to keep Republican voters’ attention on his aggressively conservative record in Florida, according to people familiar with the plans. Behind the scenes, DeSantis and his tight-knit team of advisers are interviewing national consultants to work on a presidential campaign. A retreat for roughly 150 donors, GOP leaders and lawmakers is planned for the final weekend in February at a hotel in Palm Beach, where DeSantis will tout his record as governor. Aides are speaking to and vetting operatives in early states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, who could oversee on-the-ground operations and ensure the campaign meets every requirement to qualify for the primaries, and his allies are starting to stand up a super-PAC to support his nascent candidacy, according to two people briefed on the plans.”

VanderMeer is no fan. He knows exactly what a fascist is: “After four years of punishing the people of Florida with actions largely meant to increase his personal power, Governor Ron DeSantis appears to be bringing his corrosive brand of politics to a presidential run. But DeSantis only looks like an even remotely reasonable or centrist candidate when viewed in a line-up between his gubernatorial predecessor Rick Scott and ex-U.S. catastrophe Donald Trump. That he sits comfortably between the two, accompanied by a host of extremists, should be cause for alarm, not suggestions that he is anything other than an authoritarian.”

While the slogan “Make America Florida” gains traction on bumper stickers and pundits debate DeSantis’ electability, DeSantis continues to plunge ahead with culture wars in schools that sunder communities, gaslight Floridians about the environment, and implement anti-scientific policies across life-or-death situations. But there is still— even after three years of a badly mishandled pandemic— nothing to apologize for, nothing to be accountable for, and nothing to be transparent about, to anyone.

A Florida political system that has over the course of several Republican governors maximized voter suppression and gerrymandering has contributed to DeSantis’ unprecedented ability to centralize power in Florida and muffled most effective opposition. It is in this context of restricting voting rights, too, that disastrous policy decisions opposed by millions of Floridians have been portrayed as somehow not subpar, but superlative. In certain quarters, these policies are bally-hoo’d as a form of “freedom” and “liberty.”

Just like destructive Republican governors before him feathered the nest for DeSantis's success by destroying safeguards and institutions— making it possible for DeSantis to become more predatory and authoritarian— Trump has set the table for DeSantis at the national level. Trump's coalition of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, disgruntled rightwing journalists, and evangelicals now becomes how DeSantis, who otherwise might be unelectable, can see a path to the White House.

With DeSantis’ explicit approval, the Republican-led Florida legislature has stamped out as much home rule as possible, continuing Scott’s legacy, and rendered cities and counties less able to govern effectively. This helps the special interests that fuel DeSantis’ campaigns, but does nothing for ordinary citizens.

DeSantis’ unchecked power in the state is reflected in his ability to bully that same legislature into a redistricting that removed traditionally Black voting blocs, despite the legislature preferring a more moderate plan. That he worked with national operatives to push this effort to completion hints at the networks DeSantis already has access to, even before formally announcing a run for president.

Where Scott, an austerity Republican, had not already retired or removed competency within state agencies during purges disguised as fiscal responsibility, DeSantis has continued to politicize as many positions as possible, removing vital experience from state agencies. As a feature, not a bug, of these actions, DeSantis has made many of these institutions much less transparent and accountable to Floridians.

But DeSantis has crossed boundaries Scott only dreamed of breaching— including a shameless streak of political pay-to-play. A October 2022 Tampa Bay Times article revealed that “since assuming office in 2019, DeSantis has accepted roughly $3.3 million in campaign donations from 250 people he selected for leadership roles— a 75% increase in the number of donors appointed” over Scott’s first term in office.

As DeSantis blurs the line between matters of state and his personal campaigns, he often talks about fighting the “corporate media” as a sop to his supporters, portraying himself as a modern-day American hero standing up for the common man (and, sometimes, woman). Yet his campaigns have largely been backed and supported by huge corporate conglomerates or elites.

DeSantis’ recent efforts to remove a state’s attorney reelected by the voters and reappoint an extremist judge rejected by the voters demonstrate a willingness to keep pushing the legal limits of his authority, in pursuit of more centralized control of Florida. Blurring the lines between the governorship and his campaign, DeSantis celebrated his executive order suspending “woke” Hillsborough prosecutor Andrew Warren Marshall at a rally described as “campaign-like,” complete with cheering crowds. Internal communications from the governor’s office suggest DeSantis wanted a fight with a Democratic attorney, to further push the governor’s “woke war.”

Helping DeSantis is a personal media machine that includes Christina Pushaw, former press secretary, constantly on the attack on social media. Within DeSantis’s dismal inner circle of anti-vaxxers, big developers, and people who have been arrested, Christine Pushaw serves proudly as a kind of resurrected middle-school bully. Pushaw spends a lot of her time punishing journalists on social media, acting as if facts were hand grenades strapped to puppies. This coarsening of the discourse makes almost every issue in Florida a slow grind to move through, but also as gray and lifeless as a Brutalist trompe-l’oeil. There is also, in all of this, a trickle-down effect of local Florida politicians fearing Ron, using Ron as an excuse, acting like Ron or like Ron’s inner circle, employing Ron’s tactics, giving voice to his rhetoric, believing what they think Ron believes (making it reasonable), worshipping Ron’s success.

Ron DeSantis will tell Americans in his new book Courage to Be Free that his heart “was always for the people of Florida” and pay lip service to Florida’s rich history. He will paint himself, possibly into a corner, as a hero— a David to the Goliath of corporate media, even as he takes millions from huge corporations. He will tell you he is saving the Everglades, even though most of his promises remain unkept and the measures undertaken inadequate.

DeSantis will likely exaggerate a military career that resulted in him receiving a Bronze star for classified duties during 2007-2008, only for him to leverage that honor by characterizing his service as a lawyer as indistinguishable from being a fighter pilot in ads for his 2022 campaign. Another DeSantis ad stated that God made DeSantis on the eighth day because, as God allegedly put it, “I need a protector.”

Politically, DeSantis’ first job as a member of the House of Representatives (2012-2018) displayed more evidence of his allegiance to corporate interests than being “God’s defender” of ordinary Floridians. The League of Conservation Voters gave DeSantis a 2% rating for voting against clean water and air efforts, and for Big Agriculture— only pushing back against a Big Sugar provision in a Farm Bill. These votes presaged a governorship greenwashed by its second year, despite DeSantis anointing himself a new Teddy Roosevelt of conservation.

Details about DeSantis’ military career may be sacrosanct, but recent insight into his stint as a high school teacher in Georgia provides a view of DeSantis that also undermines the idea of divine guidance. In addition to being “cocky and arrogant”—not traditional Christian values—DeSantis fraternized with students in an unprofessional way, made Black students uncomfortable with comments dismissive of slavery, and displayed “cruelty in humor” during a public prank in which he coerced a student to chug milk until the student vomited.

And while national pundits applauded DeSantis’ hurricane response, what many Floridians saw was DeSantis in spotless wading boots delaying disaster relief for a photo op while wearing the tasteless advert of a reelection badge. Or DeSantis admonishing hypothetical looters as survivors worried about digging through the wreckage to find their dead. Or, even as Florida enjoyed record surpluses and still sometimes wearing his reelection swag, DeSantis establishing and stumping for a potentially fraught private nonprofit fund for the hurricane’s victims.

But much worse still, in terms of disaster, DeSantis had already politicized the pandemic. COVID broke communities in Florida, even if some still do not know they were broken, or how broken. It left communities to fend for themselves, even in counties that tried to provide decent messaging, all while people we loved died or got sick, or got sick and died later.

Into these horrors, DeSantis inserted a counterfactual surgeon general who did not believe in masks or vaccines, and punished businesses and school boards that tried to follow the facts by instituting local mask and vaccine mandates. A state-wide communication failure and full-on disinformation campaign arguably increased death and suffering— culminating in DeSantis’ call to establish a COVID jury to help justify his decisions. DeSantis used his messaging, and his proxies’ messaging, not just to push a political agenda rather than a public health agenda, but to break down political resistance at the same time. DeSantis, in part, built his political machine on making Florida sicker.

Despite these discrepancies between image and substance, DeSantis will try to portray himself as a benevolent, successful man, “presidential” in the sense of not doing any of the things he has done as a politician. Helping that narrative will be his wife Casey DeSantis, who will provide the optics of a perfect family, scripted by a skilled media team. Her attire at her husband’s inauguration generated praise conjuring up the illusion of Jackie Kennedy, as cynically intended.

But there’s no Camelot waiting at the end of a DeSantis presidential run. Along the way, we will be subjected to more manipulative optics and endure, insult to injury, the strained extended metaphors common to authoritarians, including the one at the heart of DeSantis’ inaugural speech: “In captaining the ship of state, we choose to navigate the boisterous sea of liberty rather than cower in the calm docks of despotism.”

Normalization of cruelty matters. Normalization of authoritarianism matters. Normalization of Orwellian approaches to governance, anti-democratic to their core, matter. It is dangerous to let fascism become a concept that lazily yawns and breathes in the morning air, whistles a cheerful tune on the way to a café coffee and a breakfast sandwich, before getting down to the serious work. Thankful that, once more, it has not had to explain itself.

The business of state, which for DeSantis is often the business of his own personal politics, will continue. His fifteen-week abortion ban may become even more restrictive and concealed carry of weapons without a permit is back on the legislative agenda. In addition to a brutal campaign of suppression of queer identity, DeSantis has supported his crusade against Critical Race Theory (CRT) by trying to destroy New College with extremist (and incompetent) board appointees, and by sending a letter to all public universities asking for information on their race and diversity teachings— even as professors quit rather than subject themselves to censorship. CRT allows far-right Republicans to combine a strawman with a bogeyman in pursuit of the perfect bogus woke war, while the demonization makes it hard for colleges to effectively serve their students.

DeSantis may be less flamboyant than Trump, but he supports a style and substance of governance just as inflammatory. He weaponizes others’ emotions to create an image of himself as imbued with the qualities of some quasi-religious savior of Florida while actually making people’s lives worse. He then, over and over again, continues to inflame the discourse so the sleight of hand that is his charisma doesn’t gutter out— because the issue contains the igniting ember, not anything in DeSantis’ personality.

What this means for a DeSantis presidential campaign is unclear, despite pundits doing what they do best: throwing civilized barbaric yawps into the void and hoping the echo that comes back is the future. The chaotic DeSantis style of “governance,” from which it is difficult to pivot to whatever center remains, has only two clear benefits: it gives DeSantis more state control and more national media coverage.

The most memorable description of DeSantis at the beginning of his turn to the far right came from Nate Monroe of the Jacksonville Times-Union, who wrote that Florida’s “mad king” was “sinking ever deeper into strange and dark fever dreams.” Monroe was referring to DeSantis’ “Darwinian COVID-19 herd immunity experiment,” hiring of COVID conspiracy theorists, and as the pandemic raged, a crackdown on nonviolent Black Lives Matters protestors in the state by expanding “Stand Your Ground” laws to absolve motorists driving into marchers. (In 2022, this law would be condemned by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of on Racial Discrimination.)

In the end, it may not matter whether DeSantis is a “mad king,” a cipher like Rick Scott, an ideologue, an oligarch, an autocrat, or a rather ordinary politician in the right place at the right time. The effects of DeSantis’ actions remain the same, while in his rhetoric he often takes the term “bully pulpit” as literally as possible.

Florida and its people don’t deserve this desecration— no place does, even as DeSantis and his Republican predecessors have managed to turn an absolute paradise into a place that is close to a failed state. Because what Ron DeSantis does, at base— including to his base— is simple. He inflicts damage in pursuit of political gain. On purpose and with abandon and with no regard for collateral harm.

What trickles down, then, in the end, along with all of this “freedom,” is nepotism, corruption, cruelty, greed, and— both by design and as a byproduct of all the rest— shockingly bad ideas about governance.

Why would you want any of this inflicted on the nation?

This is the Ron DeSantis of Florida, who wants to become the Ron DeSantis of America. To tell us to our dying day that we are not communities of loving grace and communion, that we are not all connected, that acts of loving kindness are for fools and traitors. To tell us that only some of us matter, not all of us.

Maybe, in the end, if we do not heed the warnings, DeSantis will tell us, in a thousand lacerating ways, direct and indirect… that none of us matter.

Or, as one Florida congressmember told me this morning, "DeSantis is just Trump without the marketing pizazz. They both score 10 out of 10 on the Evil Scale." Poor Gov. DeSanctimonious. As Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman noted this afternoon, he’s in a pickle. With Trump pointing out his early days as a perv trying to groom underage girls (when he was a teacher), DeSanctimous has to decide how far he can go in parrying Trump’s attacks without offending Trump’s moron base. His strategy of conflict avoidance with the truculent Trumpanzee is dead in the water. “DeSantis’ abovee-the-fray posture,” they wrote, “carries risk. One of the central tenets of the modern Republican Party under Trump has been the willingness to fight, ruthlessly and tirelessly. While the Florida governor has successfully portrayed himself to conservatives as a cultural warrior, his actual experience mixing it up with powerful opponents is thinner. He was barely tested last year during his re-election bid, his first since emerging as a national political figure… Some deep-pocketed Republican donors have privately expressed concern about how DeSantis will perform when forced to directly engage with an opponent as combative and unbothered by traditional rules of decorum as Trump.”

Taking on Trump is complicated. Republican rivals have been unable for seven years to thwart his personal attacks or to dissuade an abiding loyalty to the former president among about one-third of the party’s voters.

There is often little room to question or debate Trump without being cast by him and his allies as a political adversary, or even a traitor to the country. Such slash-and-burn tactics are a staple not just of his political life, but also of his decades-long career in business before his White House tenure.

“I don’t think people fully understand how ruthless he is,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former casino executive who published a book in 1991 about working with Trump, and who said he faced vicious threats when he did. “He has no boundaries. And when you’re on the receiving end of that, you wonder what’s next.”

…It’s a really tough situation for DeSantis,” said Tommy Vietor, a Democratic strategist who worked for Senator Barack Obama in his brutal primary race against Hillary Clinton in 2008. “If he starts punching at Trump, he’s going to anger a lot of the people he needs to vote for him.”

But, Vietor noted, “if you are viewed as weak and cower in response to attacks from Trump, that will be seen as a proxy for how you will be seen as a Republican nominee and how you’ll be as president.”