Where Ron Went Wrong

The conservative script essentially says: you can be a populist, sure, but sometimes you’ll have to ‘flip a switch’ and be presidential. This reduces populism to a fun pastime, not something that should be in the White House, not really. The old right saw DeSantis as safe because he can do ‘normal’ politics as well as ‘populist’ politics. But to many voters, populism isn’t a game. It’s not a hobby. It’s not a tweet. It’s not even the odd law, and DeSantis has passed some good laws. No, it’s what they believe, all the time: that the views of ordinary people should carry more weight than the beliefs, prejudices and mad ideologies of the elite. A part-time populist is surely just a technocrat in disguise.

You don’t have to be an uncritical follower of Trump to recognise that part of his attraction is precisely that he’s ‘unpresidential’. That he refuses to play the DC game and speak in guarded tones that often disguise sinister agendas. After all, Obama was super presidential, and yet we know that behind his polished veneer there lurked a disdain for working-class voters who are ‘bitter’ and who ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them’. Is DC decorum just the mask elitism wears? Many will have wondered that.