Yes, I did mean that headline to have a double meaning.

Trump is scared of DeSantis, but the Left is even more scared of him, and would rather have Trump as the Republican candidate in 2024.

A lot of things make that fact obvious. We have already seen the “DeSantis is worse than Trump” stories, of course. But that is almost standard these days. Every new Republican star is much worse than the last Republican. It is the long-form profiles that vilify DeSantis as something truly, uniquely evil that have struck me as particularly interesting.

If your graphic for a profile is this, you aren’t signaling unconcern about the profile:

Just wondering when the media will simply start calling @GovRonDeSantis Hitler. They truly will say anything to try to prevent him from being the next President of the United States.
https://t.co/1UqpXiw6wf

— Dave Rogers (@iahphx) February 11, 2023

Esquire magazine has such a profile, and it is remarkable for both how vacuous the analysis is and how vitriolic the rhetoric is. It’s difficult to say who besides the Left and the MSM will respond to this ridiculous tripe, but it really doesn’t matter: such profiles are a way to whip up the base and spread the talking points far and wide.

It is a Rachel Maddow episode in written form. Filled with dark implications, and as substantive as Maddow’s breathless coverage of Trump’s tax returns.

Ron DeSantis is the Devil, a fascist raping and pillaging his way across Florida, and lusting to extend his reign of terror across the continent.

The opening of the profile, written by a liberal hack Jeff VanderMeer, is a classic. I almost wish I could be as hyperbolic–and I am pretty decent at hyperbole.

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.

Gee, I wonder why Floridians aren’t fleeing to California, New York, and Michigan, where apparently things are going swimmingly and they dealt with the pandemic masterfully? Florida is where the governor punishes his citizens, kills them off, and is somehow…attracting droves of new citizens, getting reelected by 20 points, and winning every battle he joins.

Has Jeff been drinking? What are his pronouns? How large is his stock of N95s? Has he been huffing his own flatulence?

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.

Just to set the record straight–Florida voter turnout was 5% higher than the national average, so the whole “voter suppression” thing is, as you already suspected, pure BS. Of course, everything Jeff says is pure BS, so it hardly merits mention.

Florida has experienced enormous net immigration since COVID hit, and DeSantis’ policies gained him a ridiculously large margin of victory. Dare we call it a landslide?

I think we dare. One that makes the victory of, say, Governor Hochul — whose COVID policies were more to Mr. VanderMeer’s liking — look tiny.

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.

Man I love Christina Pushaw! One of the happiest days of my life was when she followed me on Twitter. Despite my rather pathetic number of followers (follow me please! @davidstrom), Christina had noticed my writing. I was ecstatic.

But back to the piece. I really enjoy the “as if facts were hand grenades strapped to puppies.” I am at a loss to understand what it means, but it certainly has a ring to it. And I have to applaud Jeff for somehow getting an editor to include the phrase “as gray and lifeless as a Brutalist trompe-l’oeil.“

I mean, really, what editor would let that into a piece? I had to look it up, and I have 20 years of schooling and am one of the most voracious readers you have ever met. That’s not a brag–most of that schooling was wasted on me, and a significant chunk of that reading is popular novels–but I am pretty sure my vocabulary is in the top few percent in the country.

But the substance of the complaint, once you decipher it, is: it sucks to be a reporter covering DeSantis, and he really really hates being called out by the governor and Christina Pushaw.

That’s why we love him. Better a DeSantis than a jerk who uses phrases such as “gray and lifeless as a Brutalist trompe-l’oeil” to describe his despair at getting pantsed by a superb press flak.

And why would DeSantis give reporters the time of day when they write dreck like this?

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.

“Hypothetical looters?” “Potentially fraught?” This guy simply invents crap, as so many in the MSM do.

You can go read the rest–it is the standard recitation of DeSantis the fascist who is also and more importantly mean to reporters. If you can stand prose that is as purple as a rose in Cairo, that is.

There are plenty of indications that the Left is really worried about DeSantis–they think that after losing 3 election cycles in a row Trump is likely going to lose a fourth. DeSantis? He looks like a winner.

From copying President Trump's nicknames to copying his attacks on Ron DeSantis, one thing is clear: Filipklownski wants Republicans to nominate President Trump over Ron DeSantis in 2024. pic.twitter.com/Dd8kKQuVVP

— this Max guy (@MaxNordau) February 13, 2023

Of course what liberals say about DeSantis will have precisely zero impact on Republicans’ opinions. This is all aimed at softening up DeSantis should he become the nominee. They need him to be super scary, and need their own base to be as scared of him as they were of Trump.

Independents, as always, turn elections. They already have Independents whipped up against Trump. We will have to see if calling life in Florida as gray and lifeless as a Brutalist trompe-l’oeil will work to move them in the same way to fear DeSantis.