OPINION
FRANK BRUNI
The DeSantis Delusion
May 24,
2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/opinion/ron-desantis-republican-primary.html
Frank Bruni
By Frank
Bruni
Mr. Bruni
is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more
than 25 years.
If Ron
DeSantis is supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump, why did he sign a
ban on most abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy? That’s manna for
the Christian conservatives who matter in Republican primaries, but it’s a
liability with the moderates and independents who matter after that point. It
steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can
actually beat President Biden. It flattens that pitch into a sad little
pancake.
If DeSantis
is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a
prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? Yes, the corporation
publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and that must have annoyed him. He’s
easily annoyed. But the legislation was always going to pass anyway, and he
indeed got what he substantively wanted, so there was no need to try to punish
Disney and supercharge the conflict — except that he wanted to make a big,
manly show of his contempt for the mighty Mouse. He wanted, well, drama. So
there goes that rationale as well.
And if
DeSantis, 44, is supposed to be tomorrow’s Trump, a youthful refurbishment of
the 76-year-old former president, why does he seem so yesteryear? From his
style of hair to his dearth of flair, from his emotional remove to his fugitive
groove, there’s something jarringly anti-modern about the Florida governor.
He’s more T-Bird than Tesla, though even that’s too generous, as he’s also more
sedan than coupe.
On
Wednesday he’s expected to rev his engine and make the official, anticlimactic
announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. I just don’t get it. Oh, I
get that he wants to be the boss of all bosses — that fits. But the marketing
of DeSantis and the fact of DeSantis don’t square. Team DeSantis’s theory of
the case and the case itself diverge. In many ways, he cancels himself out. His
is a deeply, deeply puzzling campaign.
Which
doesn’t mean it won’t be successful. Right around the time Trump was declared
the 2016 winner, I exited the prediction business, or at least tried to
incorporate more humility into my own storefront, and I humbly concede that I
feel no certainty whatsoever about DeSantis’s fate.
He has a
legitimate shot at the Republican presidential nomination. He absolutely could win
the presidency. He governs the country’s third most populous state, was
re-elected to a second term there by a nearly 19-point margin, wowed key
donors, raised buckets of money and has widespread name recognition. To go by
polls of Republican voters over recent months, they’re fonder of him than of
any of the other alternatives to Trump. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson would
kill to have the kind of buzz that DeSantis has, which mostly tells you how
buzzless their own candidacies are.
But do
Republican voters want an alternative to Trump at all? The polls don’t say so.
According to the current Real Clear Politics average of such surveys, Trump’s
support is above 55 percent — which puts him more than 35 percentage points
ahead of DeSantis. Mike Pence, in third place, is roughly another 15 percentage
points behind DeSantis.
There’s an
argument that Trump’s legal troubles will at some point catch up to him.
Please. He’s already been indicted in one case and been found liable for sexual
abuse and defamation in another, and his supporters know full well about his
exposure in Georgia and elsewhere. The genius of his shameless shtick — that
the system is rigged, that everyone who targets him is an unscrupulous
political hack and that he’s a martyr, his torture a symbol of the contempt to
which his supporters are also subjected — lies in its boundless application and
timeless utility. It has worked for him to this point. Why would that stop
anytime soon?
But if,
between now and the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters do somehow develop an
appetite for an entree less beefy and hammy than Trump, would DeSantis
necessarily be that Filet-O-Fish? The many Republicans joining the hunt for the
party’s nomination clearly aren’t convinced. Despite DeSantis’s braggartly talk
about being the only credible presidential candidate beyond Biden and Trump,
the number of contenders keeps expanding.
Haley,
Vivek Ramaswamy, Hutchinson and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host,
have been in the race for a while. Tim Scott filed his paperwork last Friday
and made a public announcement on Monday. Pence and Chris Christie are expected
to join the fray in the coming days or weeks, and three current governors —
Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Doug Burgum of
North Dakota — remain possibilities. That’s one potentially crowded debate
stage, putting a premium on precisely the kind of oomph DeSantis lacks. Next to
him, Pence sizzles.
Most of
these candidates are in a pickle similar to DeSantis’s. It’s what makes the
whole contest so borderline incoherent. Implicitly and explicitly, they’re
sending the message that Republicans would be better served by a nominee other
than Trump, but they’re saying that to a party so entirely transformed by him
and so wholly in thrall to his populist rants, autocratic impulses, rightward lunges
and all-purpose rage that they’re loath to establish too much separation from
him. They’re trying to beat him without alienating his enormous base of support
by beating up on him. The circus of him has them walking tightropes of their
own.
And DeSantis
has teetered, time and again. His more-electable argument is undercut not only
by that Florida abortion law — which, tellingly, he seems to avoid talking
about — but also by the measure he recently signed to allow the carrying of
concealed firearms in Florida without a permit. That potentially puts him to
the right of the post-primary electorate, as do some of the specific details —
and the combined force — of legislation that he championed regarding education,
the death penalty, government transparency and more. In trying to show the
right wing of the Republican Party how aggressive and effective he can be, he
has rendered himself nearly as scary to less conservative Americans as Trump
is.
And as
mean. The genius of Scott’s announcement was its emphasis on optimism instead
of ire as a point of contrast with Trump, in the unlikely event that such a
contrast is consequential. “Our party and our nation are standing at a time for
choosing: victimhood or victory?” Scott said. “Grievance or greatness?” Victimhood,
grievance — gee, whoever could Scott have in mind? But DeSantis is all about
grievance and retribution, and he’s oh so grim. He sent two planeloads of
migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. He exults that Florida is “where woke goes to
die.” How sunny! It’s the Trump negativity minus the Trump electricity.
“The
overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of
the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal
protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the
Constitution.”
Michele
Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, in “No, Justice
Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution.” Read the guest essay.
His
assertion that he wants to end Republicans’ “culture of losing” is an anagram
for the accusation that Trump has prevented the party from winning, but I doubt
the dig will resonate strongly with the Republican base. As Ramesh Ponnuru
sagely observed in The Washington Post recently, Trump’s supposed toxicity is a
longstanding part of his story and his brand. “For many conservatives,” Ponnuru
wrote, “Trump’s 2016 victory reinforced the idea that ‘electability’ is a ploy
used by the media and squishy Republicans to discredit candidates who are
willing to fight for them.”
The
campaigns of DeSantis and the other would-be Trump slayers rest on the usual
mix of outsize vanity, uncommon ambition and stubborn hopefulness in
politicians who reach for the upper rungs.
But their
bids rest on something else, too — something I share, something so many of us
do, something that flies in the face of all we’ve seen and learned over the
eight years since Trump came down that escalator, something we just can’t
shake: the belief that a liar, narcissist and nihilist of his mammoth
dimensions cannot possibly endure, and that the forces of reason and caution
will at long last put an end to his perverse dominance.
DeSantis is
betting on that without fully and boldly betting on that. It’s a hedged affair,
reflecting the fact that it may be a doomed one.
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Frank Bruni
is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author
of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He
writes a weekly email newsletter.
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