Consider some of the lowlights of Trump’s presidency. DeSantis opposed Trump’s policy of mass family separation. He has nothing like Trump’s record of praising dictators. And while DeSantis has not been a profile in courage in calling out Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election, he also has not broadcast that lie himself.
The accusation that DeSantis is an enemy of democracy rests heavily on exaggerated claims about an election law he signed; a “sweeping voter suppression law,” the liberal Brennan Center calls it. It’s true that the law includes new restrictions, such as requiring that county employees oversee ballot drop-boxes. But it’s also true that the law leaves Floridians with greater ballot access, in key respects, than a lot of states run by Democrats. Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, unlike Delaware and New York.
Finally, there’s the matter of DeSantis’s lib-owning style. He is obviously happy to annoy liberals for no reason other than pleasing conservatives, as when he smirked his way through a bill-signing in Brandon, Florida. But it’s absurd to take DeSantis to illustrate that Republicans now think smiting the left “matters more than achieving policy objectives,” as one journalist put it.
Even the “culture-war” legislation DeSantis has backed, regulating classroom instruction on sexual orientation and on race relations, has been about more than upsetting his political opponents.
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