Ron DeSanctimonious— Getting To Know Him… Getting To Know All About Him

"Ron DeSanctimonious" by Nancy Ohanian

Ron DeSantis has commissioned a flattering autobiography of himself to be written and published by late February as part of his campaign to overtake Trump as the GOP frontrunner for 2024. He will personally read it before it goes to the printer. He and his campaign team have already come up with a title: The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival and a jacket design. It's a better title than Florida's Strange No-Eye-Contact Oddball. The neo-fascist arm of HarperCollins Publishing will be putting it out and plans to drive it up the best seller charts by giving thousands of copies away at evangelical churches and KKK rallies:

More exciting than his book announcement for DeSantis though, is how his new school boards are already busy purging educators. Before dawn this morning, Andrew Atterbury reported how DeSantis is getting his revenge on educators who enforced COVID mandates during the pandemic. School boards DeSantis helped elect in 2 backward red counties— Brevard and Sarasota— “sacked their school superintendents over the span of one week. The ousters were spurred by how the superintendents carried out local policies like efforts to support the rights of parents, an issue inflamed by schools imposing student mask mandates last fall in defiance of DeSantis. And while not tied to the 2022 election, the school board in Broward County earlier this month fired its superintendent through an effort led by five members appointed by DeSantis. All combined, school boards with ties to DeSantis pushed out three superintendents in November alone— and each of them served over districts that implemented student mask mandates.” [DeSantis and his agenda are responsible for 82,875 COVID deaths as of this morning. And the half dozen most pro-DeSantis counties-- Holmes, Washington, Glades, Liberty, Dixie and Calhoun-- are the least vaccinated in the state, 35% or below in a state with an already low 69% vaccination rate.]

Atterbury wrote that “The boards in both counties now have conservative majorities who sought a change in leadership immediately after the midterms. Although school boards are nonpartisan posts, lines between Democratic and Republican candidates were drawn in many counties through endorsements from each party as well as outside groups. The newly-elected board members in these cases support parental rights while opposing critical race theory and teaching gender orientation in schools. DeSantis in particular used his clout to endorse more than two dozen school board candidates during the 2022 election cycle, a rare move for a Florida governor that came with $1,000 cash contributions from DeSantis and other GOP lawmakers. Most of the candidates DeSantis endorsed won their elections and are now transforming the make-up of school district leadership and will have huge influence over policies affecting hundreds of thousands of students in the state.”

Writing for The Atlantic this morning, Mark Leibovich warns people they may be in for some surprises as they get to know the DeSantis so adored by right-wing media. His aides endlessly repeat the refrain that he’s “Trump with a brain.” The big GOP donors (including Fox News, the biggest GOP donor of all) see him as the Republicans’ way out of the Trump conundrum. “The question is whether DeSantis’s presidential hopes will perish as he starts getting out more on the Iowa–New Hampshire dating apps,” suggested Leibovich. “People who know him better and have watched him longer are skeptical of his ability to take on the former president. DeSantis, they say, is no thoroughbred political athlete. He can be awkward and plodding. And Trump tends to eviscerate guys like that. ‘He was standoffish in general,’ the Virginia Republican Barbara Comstock, a former House colleague of DeSantis’s, told me.” Rick Wilson called him “A strange no-eye-contact oddball.”

“I’d rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis,” says Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee lobbyist who set sail from the GOP over his revulsion for Trump and his knockoffs. To sum up: DeSantis is not a fun and convivial dude. He prefers to keep his earbuds in. His “Step away from the vehicle” vibes are strong.

…[N]o shortage of alleged heavyweights have entered previous primary races only to reveal themselves as decidedly not ready for prime time, or even late-night C-SPAN. Political handicappers and fundraisers overhype them. Expectations create a cryptolike bubble. Then they finally show up and fail to dazzle. The gloss fades fast. You can ask President Beto O’Rourke about this.

“I think he is going to run into some challenges,” Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Florida who served with DeSantis in the House, told me. “It’s that question that often comes up in politics— the question of ‘Would you want to have a beer with him?’’’ This is a big-time cliché, of course, but it does feel pertinent. Will he grow on voters like a catchy song, or like mold? DeSantis “has this robotic quality that he has to shed,” Curbelo said. “Everything else checks the box. He is smart and competent and committed to his ideology. He just has to humanize himself.”

All while Trump will be running DeSantis through his patented dehumanizer machine, which made such mashed mush of his rivals in 2016. Trump’s efficient cartooning of “Low-Energy Jeb,” “Liddle Marco,” and “Lyin’ Ted” left them flailing pathetically.

“On a debate stage, all of Trump’s strengths go straight to DeSantis’s weaknesses,” Stipanovich told me. Trump has energy and presence; DeSantis “is dour and doesn’t improvise particularly well.” People who are appropriately sycophantic to Trump swear he possesses a certain charm and charisma. Even those who are eager to vouch for DeSantis don’t say this about him. He would launch any charm offensive unarmed.

“My sense is that Trump would gut DeSantis with a dull deer antler,” said Stipanovich, who has a taste for violent animal metaphors. He also predicted that “Trump would club DeSantis like a baby seal.”

In fairness, DeSantis is not completely defenseless. So far, Trump has whined that DeSantis has not been sufficiently loyal or “classy” toward him. He called DeSantis an “average REPUBLICAN governor.” He’s given him a mean nickname, “Ron DeSanctimonious,” which to be honest is kind of meh— not midseason Trump by any means. DeSantis brushed it off as “just noise.”

Like Trump, DeSantis has a feral, shameless quality. As an underdog candidate for governor in 2018, DeSantis showed a remarkable willingness to prostrate himself before the then-president, even by the cringey standards of Trump-era toadyism. The apex— or nadir— of this effort involved an ad in which the candidate is shown reading a bedtime story to his baby son, the latter clad in a red Make America great again onesie.

“Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired,’” the doting dad reads. This gambit proved wildly effective for DeSantis, propelling the backbencher congressman to an upset victory in the Republican primary. There might be no better example of a candidate allowing his political identity— and self-respect— to be totally devoured by his allegiance to Trump, at least for as long as it suited him. For the sake of the child, hopefully this scene will never be spoken of again.

The pure nerve that allowed DeSantis to so debase himself before Trump and then promptly turn against his former kingmaker could serve him well. DeSantis understands intuitively that loyalty in politics can be a loser’s proposition. “Ron’s strength as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck,” a Republican consultant told The New Yorker. “Ron’s weakness as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck.”

“I don’t think Ron hangs out with anybody, from what I can tell,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said during an appearance on the Ruthless podcast. Christie, who encountered DeSantis at Republican Governors Association meetings, said his Florida counterpart tended to remain cocooned inside his entourage. “I don’t see him hanging with the other governors,” Christie said.

DeSantis works harder than Trump does, and is more disciplined and capable of adapting. He attended Yale and Harvard Law School and clearly took some classes in populism. He could conceivably grow more adept at carrying on conversations in diners and pretending to care about the pet issues of self-important state reps in the North Country.

But certain political skills are more innate, and require an ability to ad-lib that DeSantis lacks. He can appear needlessly snappish and reactive (earlier this year, he scolded a group of high-school students for wearing masks onstage behind him). One particular interlude during DeSantis’s 2022 campaign bears revisiting. It occurred during a debate with his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, who attempted to pin down the governor on whether he would commit to serving out his four-year term if reelected. In other words, was DeSantis running for president in 2024 or not? “Yes or no, Ron?” Crist pressed him. DeSantis froze. “It’s a fair question and he won’t tell you,” Crist said, filling the silence.

Finally, a moderator jumped in and reminded the candidates that they were not permitted to ask each other direct questions, allowing DeSantis to regroup. “Well, I know that Charlie is interested in talking about 2024 and Joe Biden,” DeSantis said, delivering what was clearly a rehearsed line. “But I just want to make this very, very clear. The only worn-out old donkey I’m looking to put out to pasture is Charlie Crist.” Cute recovery. But still awkward.

DeSantis probably figured— rightly— that he was in no danger of losing to Crist and might as well suffer through the silence rather than complicate things when he decides to bolt from Florida to run for president. But a fluid politician could have better finessed that exchange. And Trump likely took note and filed this away. “He knew and assessed the weaknesses of DeSantis on the debate stage and in the media space,” Wilson wrote in his Resolute Square essay, concluding that Trump will tear him to pieces. “He smelled blood.”

Republicans who want to save the party from Trump are investing great hope in a blank slate. The New York Post has dubbed him “DeFuture.” I would dub that DeBatable.