The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

THERE is a TV ad running in major US markets these days. It is a direct attack on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In the ad, someone solemnly declares that DeSantis has supported efforts “to raise the national retirement age to 70 (it is currently 62 to get some Social Security benefits).” The voice then states that DeSantis “has voted to defund Social Security and Medicare.”

Images of the Florida governor are displayed on the ad. They depict him as dark, dour, unsmiling and vaguely sinister.

It’s a little bit jarring to be experiencing these ads now, when the GOP convention in Milwaukee is scheduled for next summer and the preceding primary elections are still many months away.

Seeing the ad also begs the question: Who is paying for it? A squint at the fine print at the end reveals that this particular advertisement is being paid for by a group calling itself MAGA. As in “Make America Great Again.” As in Donald J. Trump.

Trump warned Florida’s governor and all of us five months ago that he would not tolerate insubordination from DeSantis. As usual, Trump wasn’t kidding. He has suggested that “DeSantis would be working in a law office, a cigar store or a pizza parlor if I had not endorsed him and helped boost him to become governor.”

Who knows if this is true? But Trump has a way of blustery bullying behaviour that seems to defy and disarm every single rival except Joe Biden, the one he might well face next year in the general election.

DeSantis is pushing back, but not very publicly. One of his support groups released a video featuring a man who said “Ron DeSantis can win the general election. I don’t think that’s something that I believe Donald Trump can do.” During an appearance in Pennsylvania recently, DeSantis told reporters that “there is no substitute for victory. The winners get to make policy. The losers go home.”

So that’s DeSantis’ message: The GOP should nominate me because I have a proven track record of victory and achievement. Maybe this will succeed. But Florida’s governor is overlooking the reality that Trump’s appeal to his solid base of conservative grass-roots support is emotional, not rational.

There is plenty of evidence that Republican primary voters in particular care more about and truly relish the finger-in-the-eye bluster of Trump than they do about “policy” issues, even touchstone ones like abortion and even guns. Many in Trump’s base might realize he doesn’t care about these issues at all, and that his bedrock sympathies could lie elsewhere. They don’t care.

They care about Trump because he, uniquely, abundantly and loudly, returns the dismissive disdain they feel from the established elites in the US, Republican as well as Democratic.

The Republican elite has made it clear that they’re looking for someone other than Trump to head the GOP ticket next year. It looks like they’ve settled for now on DeSantis.

There was a recent column in the Wall Street Journal that seems to reaffirm this. It was authored by Peggy Noonan, who rose to prominence as a key aide to President Ronald Reagan 40 years ago and has been a fairly consistent and influential conservative establishment voice since then. She worked for both President Bushes. In her recent column, she talks about DeSantis and reveals much of the Republican establishment thinking about him.

Noonan also reflects the revulsion felt toward Trump by the Bush family, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, now Chris Christie and numerous others from the “traditional” wing of the party who were happy to harvest the votes of Tea Party and MAGA zealots but secretly despised them perhaps even more than Democrats do. Here’s what Noonan had to say in the Wall Street Journal about DeSantis:

“The Florida governor is definitely running. Every sign is there: donors, a growing and increasingly professional organization, a book that is part memoir, part platform and debuted this week at No. 1 on the New York Times list. He recently gave a big, packed-house speech at the Reagan Library.

“He’s come off a landslide 2022 re-election (almost 20 points) in which he won majorities of Hispanics, independents and women. He is 44, governor of a major state that was purple and has gone red, and there is no way (barring the unanticipated) he is not in.

“He’s tough, unadorned, and carries a vibe, as I’ve said, that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone. His supporters just shrug. He’s not warm and cuddly. I don’t think voters are looking for warm and cuddly, but they do want even-keeled—a normal man or woman who’s a leader, who has guts and a vision of where the country needs to go.

“I don’t think he’s running as Trump without the psychopathology. I think he’s running as a serious, forward-leaning, pro-business, anti-woke conservative with populist inflections.”

DeSantis is basically newsworthy because he’s been introduced as the likeliest antidote to Trump, whose sway over the American body politic could be compared to the enduring, ineradicable reach of Juan Peron in Argentina. DeSantis doesn’t really project dynamism. He does absolutely project determination. He controls Florida politics now. Like Trump and most other prominent Republicans, he gives off the vague vibe of not really believing the noise about abortion, guns, Russia, immigrants, etc., etc. that rouse the base.

But his record of head-butting Disney in Orlando and overseeing a malevolent anti-immigrant and (to some minds) anti-women agenda in Tallahassee gives hope to social conservative zealots. Like most Republicans, DeSantis recognizes that to get nominated, he must court extremist votes, then tack sharply toward the middle for the general election.

Here’s Noonan again about how DeSantis’ views do synch with those of many of the MAGA zealots:

“His leadership in Florida has been what he has called a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground. These elites are a ruling class that controls the federal bureaucracy, big business, corporate media, big tech, the universities. These elites are so-called progressives who believe our country should be managed by an exclusive cadre of experts who wield authority through an unaccountable and massive administrative state. They tend to view average Americans with contempt.”

Trump’s braggadocio about DeSantis being nothing without Trump isn’t baseless. He was indeed a well-educated (Yale and Harvard Law School), Navy lawyer and an obscure central Florida congressman when Trump decided to endorse him.

DeSantis won the GOP primary, then eked out a microscopic victory over former Tallahassee Mayor and Democrat Andrew Gillum in the general election in 2018. The margin was 30,000 votes out of more than 8 million votes cast. Gillum, who is black, had faced prior drug-related charges and on June 22, 2022, he was indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Florida on 21 felony counts, including wire fraud, conspiracy, and making false tax statements.

Last November, DeSantis rolled to re-election over Democrat Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor of Florida!

Christ is urbane and Gillum is charismatic, but we’re not talking about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama here. DeSantis’ wins over Crist and Gillum hardly qualify him as unbeatable in a nationwide general election.

Here are some liberal snarks about DeSantis from the Washington Post and New York Times:

(After DeSantis dismissed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “local territorial dispute”): “Apparently no one told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that if you’re going to wade into the deep waters of foreign policy, you should at least know how to dog paddle.”

(In a review of DeSantis’ recent book): “He takes dullness to a fresh level, redefining what clichéd writing can sound like. It’s one thing to offer the public a bit of wooden prose, but DeSantis gives us an entire lumber yard.”

(On DeSantis’ enemies list from his book): “There’s the news media, with modifiers like ‘legacy’ or ‘corporate’ adding a nefarious touch. There’s Big Tech, that ‘censorship arm of the political left,’ and the powerful corporations that cave to the ‘leftist-rage mob.’ There are universities like Harvard and Yale, which DeSantis attended but did not inhale.”

It says here that there’s a decent chance Ron DeSantis is a shooting star, bright now on the American political horizon, but perhaps destined to become a footnote 18 months hence.