Is Trump Heading for Florida Again Tomorrow
Guest Essay
'Nosotros Want People That Are Going to Fight the Left,' Says the Man Out-Trumping Trump
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly cavalcade from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, is giving Donald Trump a run for his coin as the most divisive politician in America.
"Nosotros want people that are going to fight the left, and that'due south what we need to do in this country," DeSantis declared in an interview with Play a joke on News on Feb. 8. "That'south what nosotros're doing in Florida, standing up for people's freedoms. We're opposing wokeness. We're opposing all these things."
In a Nov. v, 2021, article on the liberal Daily Brute website, "Drastic, Deranged DeSantis Devolves Into Dumb Troll," Ruben Navarrette Jr. wrote that DeSantis "is a terrible governor who is failing his leadership course with flight colors. Driven only by politics and naked ambition, he pursues reckless policies that separate Floridians and may even put them in danger."
The governor routinely succumbs to correct-fly pressure level groups, Navarrette continued, "because he apparently has no cadre beliefs other than the unshakable conviction that he should sit in the Oval Part."
On Jan. 17, 2022, The Guardian followed upwards from the left:
In a red-meat-for-the-base of operations address at the opening of Florida'due south legislature last week, themed around the concept of "liberty" only described by critics as a fanfare of authoritarianism, DeSantis gave a clear indication of the problems he believes are on voters' minds. They include fighting the White House over Covid-nineteen, ballot box fraud, critical race theory in schools and defunding law enforcement.
The view from the correct is starkly different.
On March 14, Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review, heaped praise on DeSantis as "the voice of the new Republican Party," a politician who "opens upward a vista offering an important element of Trumpism without the baggage or selfishness of Trump."
Lowry argues that DeSantis has strategically positioned himself on the cutting border of a political move with the potential to have "broad appeal to M.O.P. voters of all stripes without the distracting obsessions of the former president." This "could be ane of the nearly persuasive arguments to Republican voters for Trump not running over again — not that he needs to go abroad then the old party tin can exist restored, but that he's unnecessary because a new party has emerged."
DeSantis's political strength amidst conservative voters — and the reason for the unanimous hostility toward him on the left — lies in his capacity to stay relentlessly on message.
His dealings with the press result in headlines that are cerise meat to his bourgeois loyalists: "Ron DeSantis Berates Reporter Over Question Near Florida'due south 'Don't Say Gay' Beak," "AP urges DeSantis to terminate bullying aimed at reporter" and "DeSantis and the Media: (Not) a Beloved Story."
"If the corporate press nationally isn't attacking me, then I'one thousand probably not doing my chore," DeSantis tweeted on Jan. 7. "Then, the fact that they are attacking me is a good indication that I'chiliad tackling the big issues."
A Yale graduate with a police force caste from Harvard, DeSantis served as an attorney in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps at Guantánamo Bay and in Republic of iraq equally a senior legal adviser to SEAL Team One. He is smart and disciplined, and runs his political career like a military campaign. Lacking Trump'southward impulsiveness and preference for anarchy, a President DeSantis, with his attention to particular and command of the legislative process, might well match or exceed Trump as liberals' worst nightmare.
Susie Wiles, a Republican consultant who helped guide the last month of DeSantis'due south 2018 campaign for governor, described the candidate as a "workhorse."
"It's like watching an actor who can film the whole scene in ane accept," Wiles told The Miami Herald. "He can gobble up a whole issue in ane conference, and when I saw that on my 2nd day, I idea, 'This is a whole different kind of thing.'" Wiles added, "If he doesn't have a photographic retentivity, it's close."
I asked a number of Democratic strategists which 2024 Republican nominee worried them almost, Trump, DeSantis or Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
Paul Begala, a national Democratic strategist, argued by email that
DeSantis seems to be the furthest down the track on replicating Trump's politics of grievance and bullying. For a nifty many Republicans, politics is no longer virtually allocating resource in the wisest, nigh equitable way. It is instead about "owning the libs."
Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, compares DeSantis to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and finds both men disturbing. "DeSantis and Cotton fiber are dangerous considering they are both true-believer ideologues who would be smarter and more disciplined than Trump about using the levers of power to push their correct-fly agendas," Garin wrote by email, earlier adding:
Each of them are defective in personal charm and I don't think voters would notice either i to exist peculiarly likable or relatable over the grade of a long presidential campaign. DeSantis'south meanness in particular could come back to haunt him in a national campaign.
DeSantis relishes using the state to enforce his ambitious social agenda and has consistently plotted a hard-right form on issues from critical race theory to transgender rights.
For example, DeSantis sponsored and pushed through the legislature the "Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Westward.O.Grand.E.) Act" — or the Stop Woke Act for short — which at present awaits his signature.
The legislation, Florida H.B. seven, bans teaching critical race theory that suggests that
A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sexual practice is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
or that
A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no office, committed in the by by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.
A second bill, the Parental Rights in Instruction Act, H.B. 1557, which opponents telephone call the "Don't Say Gay Bill," is also on DeSantis'southward desk for his signature. The measure reads:
Classroom teaching past schoolhouse personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may non occur in kindergarten through grade three or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
At a March four news briefing, DeSantis told reporters: "Clearly, right now, nosotros come across a lot of focus on transgenderism, telling kids that they may be able to pick genders and all that. I don't think parents desire that for these young kids," before calculation, "I retrieve it'due south inappropriate to exist injecting those matters, like transgenderism, into a kindergarten classroom."
On Apr 10, 2021, DeSantis signed the "Combating Public Disorder Act," a bourgeois response to Black Lives Thing and other protests that plow violent or subversive. On Sept. 9, 2021, however, U.South. Commune Estimate Marking Walker blocked enforcement of the law because a person of "ordinary intelligence" could not be sure if he or she bankrupt the law while participating nonviolently in a protest that turned violent:
The vagueness of this definition forces would-be protesters to make a choice between declining to jointly express their views with others or risk being arrested and spending fourth dimension behind confined, with the associated collateral risks to employment and financial well-beingness.
DeSantis has capitalized on Florida'due south outdoor culture to become the nation's leading opponent of mask mandates and lockdowns of schools and businesses, including a May 3, 2021, executive club declaring:
In lodge to protect the rights and liberties of individuals in this State and to accelerate the State's recovery from the Covid-xix emergency, any emergency guild issued by a political subdivision due to the Covid-nineteen emergency which restricts the rights or liberties of individuals or their businesses is invalidated.
For DeSantis, the pandemic offered the opportunity to distinguish himself from Trump. In Jan, Jonathan Chait described his strategy in New York magazine:
Where Trump was tiptoeing around vaccine skepticism, DeSantis jumped in with both feet, banning private companies like prowl lines from requiring vaccination, appointing a vaccine skeptic to his state's highest office, and refusing to say if he's gotten his booster dose.
DeSantis "may or may not actually be more delusional on Covid than Donald Trump," Chait wrote, "but it is a revealing commentary on the state of their party that he sees his best adventure to supervene upon Trump every bit positioning himself as even crazier."
Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, has a similar take on the Trump-DeSantis Covid feud, writing on Jan. 18:
What's of a sudden intriguing is that DeSantis has decided to try to outflank Trump, to out-Trump Trump, in terms of his difficult-trolling of the libs on the vaccine question. And it's Trump —Donald Trump! — who is playing the role of civilizing, normalizing truth teller.
Politically speaking, withal, DeSantis'south stance on Covid policy, together with his culture state of war calendar, has been a success. His favorability ratings accept soared and in the third quarter of 2021, the near recent data available, Florida's gross domestic product grew by three.eight percent, 3rd fastest in the nation, according to the Agency of Economic Assay, behind Hawaii and Delaware.
DeSantis's aggressive posture and threats to bring legal action have created anxiety about retribution in some quarters. In Jan, for example, Dr. Raul Pine, the administrator for the Florida Department of Health'due south office in Orange County, wrote his staff to say that only 77 of 558 staff members had received a Covid-19 booster, 219 had two doses of the vaccine and 34 had only one dose, co-ordinate to reporting past my colleague Patricia Mazzei in The Times. "I am sorry but in the absence of reasonable and real reasons it is irresponsible not to be vaccinated," Dr. Pino added. He went on: "We have been at this for two years, we were the first to give vaccines to the masses, we have done more than 300,000 and we are not fifty-fifty at l percentage. Pathetic."
Shortly afterward, Pino was put on administrative leave for a month. Jeremy T. Redfern, the press secretarial assistant for the Department of Health, said when the leave of absence was announced that the department was "conducting an research to make up one's mind if whatever laws were broken in this instance." Redfern said in a statement that the decision to get vaccinated "is a personal medical option that should be made free from coercion and mandates from employers."
This and other similar developments have certainly not hurt DeSantis's poll numbers. The latest survey released on Feb. 24 by Public Stance Research Lab at the Academy of N Florida found not but that "of the elected officials on this survey, Governor Ron DeSantis had the highest task approval rating at 58 percent, with 37 pct disapproval," only likewise that Florida Republicans preferred DeSantis over Trump 44-41 as their presidential nominee.
John Feehery, a Republican lobbyist who previously worked for the party's Business firm leaders, argues that DeSantis is
attuned to the libertarian impulses of an electorate that just doesn't trust the conventional wisdom coming out of Washington. DeSantis also seems willing to court cultural conservatives in means that most Washington politicians don't, like with the sex activity education bill that he signed. DeSantis besides seems willing to take on large corporations for their wokeness, a strong issue among the G.O.P. base.
Feehery described DeSantis as "a wild carte du jour," noting "he was also right on Covid, which took an incredible corporeality of courage."
As governor, DeSantis is wary when he senses the potential for blowback, waiting days earlier commenting on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. When he finally did so, his comments were largely focused on domestic politics.
At a Feb. 28 news conference, DeSantis placed blame for the invasion on the "weakness" of the Biden assistants while lavishing praise on Trump. "When Obama was president, Putin took Crimea. When Trump was president, they didn't take anything. And at present Biden's president and they're rolling into Ukraine," DeSantis said, arguing that Biden'due south withdrawal from Transitional islamic state of afghanistan was a "total catastrophe" that emboldened Putin.
Along with supporters, DeSantis has many harsh critics.
Nancy Isenberg, a historian at Louisiana State Academy and the author of "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America," wrote by email that "DeSantis is still another Ivy League graduate of Yale and Harvard, pretending to be one of the people," adding that
DeSantis represents a tried and truthful feature of American politics: You pretend to care most the "mutual man," speaking his linguistic communication, and while his gaze is captivated past the dazzling show, as Lyndon Johnson remarked of poor white rage, "he won't notice you're picking his pockets."
Anthony Brunello, a professor of political scientific discipline at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., wrote in an email that "Ron DeSantis is similar Trump in that he is a creature of power." Brunello posed the question, "Who believes in their ideology more than — Trump or DeSantis?" DeSantis, he answered:
His bourgeois values lean against responding to climate change, dealing with environmental bug, providing health care, establishing disaster insurance on a statewide basis, improving social services, rebuilding infrastructure, improving public education, improving the foster intendance system, protecting the ocean and coastline and fisheries, moving on prison reform, protecting the right to vote and and so on. DeSantis has no plans to do any of those things in a land that needs them all. Instead, he is deep into culture wars, battling against critical race theory — and backing anti-Fifty.Chiliad.B.T.Q. legislation — because it will win votes and hold that conservative core. He calculates Trump volition fade in the months to come and he will pick upwards the pieces.
DeSantis is running for re-election this twelvemonth and is conspicuously favored to win a second term. He has raised more than $86 million, dwarfing the seven-figure totals collected by the 2 leading Democratic contenders, former governor Charlie Crist and Nikki Fried, the Florida commissioner of agriculture.
Campaign finance in Florida is a major deregulated industry in itself.
Large donors to DeSantis, co-ordinate to the website Florida Politics, include:
$200,000 from a unmarried source, Due west Palm Beach-based visitor Kane Fiscal. Two political committees also wrote vi-figure checks. The Potent Communities of Southwest Florida PC and The Committee for Justice, Transportation and Business, both chaired past lobbyist David Ramba, each donated $150,000. Floridians for Positive Change and Focused on Florida'south Future PC, two other Ramba-headed political committees, also wrote $75,000 checks to Friends of Ron DeSantis this month.
DeSantis has dismissed speculation that he will run for president in 2024 as "nonsense," simply Trump does not believe him. How do we know this? Considering Trump has issued a series of direct and indirect hostile comments targeting DeSantis, but often without naming him.
On Jan. 12, Trump criticized "politicians" who refuse to say whether they take been vaccinated: "The reply is 'Yeah,' but they don't want to say it, because they're gutless."
Axios reported on Jan. 16 that Trump was telling associates that DeSantis is "an ingrate with a 'tiresome personality' and no realistic hazard of chirapsia him in a potential 2024 showdown."
Trump, whose ain interest in running for president grew, some say, subsequently Barack Obama baited him at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, should know meliorate than to toss insults at a politician like DeSantis — a bulldog who does not dorsum downwards from a fight.
As Rich Lowry, whose adoration for DeSantis I discussed earlier, wrote in Pol on January. 20, 2022:
The Trump-DeSantis story line is inherently attracting, because the chances of a standoff between two men who accept been allies and the possibility of the subordinate in the relationship, DeSantis, eclipsing the effigy who helped to elevate him into what he is today.
Some version of what DeSantis represents, Lowry continued, "has the greatest odds of coaxing the party abroad from Trump and forging a new political synthesis that bears the unmistakable postage of Trump while jettisoning his flaws."
Lowry even suggested a line of set on: that Trump "elevated Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Establish of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, early in the pandemic and listened to his advice for as well long"; that "despite all his talk of building a border wall, Trump didn't get it done and left a desperately flawed immigration system intact, even though he had two years of a Republican Congress"; that Trump "rattled Cathay's cage but didn't make fundamental changes"; and that Trump "lost to Joe Biden, a desperately flawed candidate who simply made information technology into the White House because Trump made himself and so unpopular."
For DeSantis, there is nix to gain past declaring now what he will do in 2024. Instead, he continues to gain national stature as he builds a powerful fund-raising base of operations, stressing themes that draw back up from conservatives in Florida and from beyond the nation.
In one fund-raising solicitation, DeSantis warns of "cultural Marxism," according to the website Florida Politics, telling prospective donors: "We delivered on a hope to the people of Florida by banning critical race theory. This 'curriculum' of hate and divisiveness has no place in guild, let lonely our schools. Critical race theory indoctrinates our children and teaches them to judge each other as 'oppressors,' 'inherent racists' and 'victims.'"
A second DeSantis fund-raising letter reads: "Joe Biden might want Governor DeSantis to get out of the way and then he tin can impose his radical agenda, simply Governor DeSantis will not kowtow to disciplinarian bullying from Joe Biden or anyone else."
Not only do these themes stand set for apply in a presidential bid, but their very pugnacity suggests that Trump may want to reconsider his provocative bullying strategy when it comes to DeSantis.
DeSantis has a wide range of options. He has positioned himself as a leading 2024 presidential candidate if Trump falters. If Trump does run and looks unbeatable in the race for the nomination, DeSantis tin can hold back and wait until 2028, when he volition be 50 — the prime number of life for a presidential candidate.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/opinion/ron-desantis-is-gambling-on-out-trumping-trump.html
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