There is actually more than one Republican candidate for president who has already announced. It’s just that the media don’t pay any attention to them because they don’t have any chance against Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. However, this week a couple of Republicans announced a presidential campaign and they did get a certain level of coverage. In one case, for all the wrong reasons.
On Monday, May 22, Senator Tim Scott (R.-South Carolina) officially announced his presidential campaign after hinting at it for several months. He’s been Senator since 2014 (filling a term for a retiring senator) and has been re-elected twice since then, including 2022. He’s said to be well-liked by members of both parties in Washington, which is kind of rare these days. In his speech, he hit on the Republicans’ usual red-meat issues, including building a border wall, while also playing up a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps past as the son of a black single mother who went on to become the (only) Black Republican US Senator. For many reasons, he ought to appeal to a lot of people who remember the Republican Party as it used to be, and to people outside the Party. In his speech, Scott said: “We need a president who persuades not only our friends and our base.” He added, “We have to have a compassion for people who don’t agree with us.”
Well, that’s how I knew his primary campaign was doomed right there.
Tim Scott is well-spoken (and lest that seem patronizing, how many white politicians in either major party are well spoken these days?) and he seems to have honor. I say, seems to, given that as a Republican he is by definition obliged to go along with any sleazy thing the collective wants to push on the country. But he hearkens back to a time when Republicans were simply one wing of a political establishment that had a common conception of America as a constitutional republic, as opposed to being the right-wing version of a Leninist insurgency that aims to seize the state and remake society in its image.
A person who cares about morality, compassion (what person does that remind you of when you look at the Republican Party?) or persuasion rather than flipping off the libs is not somebody who has appeal to this Republican Party. Incidentally, they’re not a Grand Old Party any more so I refuse to call them “GOP.” Unless it stands for something like “Greedy Old Puritans” or “Guaranteeing Omnipresent Pedophilia.”
The people who run, or at least think they run, the Party are perfectly okay with using culture war agitation to get folks to vote for them while they turn the republic into a corporate feudalism, but the fact that they have to recruit from that group means that it’s harder to get things done in a legislature when some of their people actually believe things like the Flat Earth theory. What they want is somebody who’s going to rile up the proles while still being literate enough to negotiate bills on those increasingly rare occasions that Republicans still rely on legislation rather than courts. And so God made them…
Ron DeSantis.
Ronald Dion DeSantis (yes, his middle name came from the singer) was born in Florida and grew up playing baseball in both Little League and in college at Yale. In 2001, he graduated Yale magna cum laude and by 2005 had received a Juris Doctor law degree from Harvard Law School. Prior to getting this degree, DeSantis joined the Navy as a commissioned officer in 2004, joining JAG (Judge Advocate General).
DeSantis was promoted to full Lieutenant in 2006, the same year he was assigned to the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay. According to Wikipedia, “The records of his service in the Navy were often redacted upon release to the public, to protect personal privacy, according to the Navy. Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, who was held at Guantanamo, alleged in 2022 that DeSantis oversaw force-feedings of detainees.”
Wow, even then Ron DeSantis was looking to build his resume as a Republican presidential candidate. That’s some work ethic.
Anyway, DeSantis moved back to Florida after leaving active duty, running for US Congress (Florida 6th Congressional District) in 2012 and getting re-elected twice. In 2018 DeSantis ran for Florida Governor to replace the term-limited Republican Rick Scott. “Asked whether he could name an issue on which he disagreed with Trump, DeSantis declined.” After a controversial recount, he beat Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum (which in retrospect might have been a case of Democrats dodging a bullet). In his 2022 re-election campaign, he went against former Governor (and former Republican) Charlie Crist, who in their one TV debate demanded that DeSantis commit to serving his full term rather than use the office as a stepping stone to the White House. DeSantis dodged the question and ended up beating Crist by 19 points.
Part of DeSantis’ popularity was playing to the anti-mask/anti-vax sentiment during the COVID eruption, even though he was not so doctrinaire as to avoid all containment measures. This appealed to people who didn’t like COVID restrictions on public activity and public school attendance. This and his fierce social conservatism allowed him to pose as a defender of “freedom” against “socialism”, and that also had a huge appeal to Florida Hispanics whose families fled countries like Cuba and Venezuela. But he also used that culture war posture as a wedge to define “freedom” as the freedom of government to restrict other people on behalf of his favored political demographic.
DeSantis is considered to do a pretty good job as Governor, if one defines the role of Governor as using one’s executive power in conjunction with a legislative majority to turn their state into a one-party regime. His appeal is expressly to those people who think that’s what America ought to be like. The difference between them and the typical Trumpniks is that DeSantis has the brains and legal background to get things done behind the scenes, and up to this point, that made him politically popular. But as his quest to be more Trump than Trump leads him to areas like abortion prohibition that have not been very popular even in red states, you get to the problem with DeSantis trying to be more Trump than Trump: He would have to have Trump’s “charisma” (which completely evades me) and his command of the media. And he’s completely lacking in both.
Even before he actually made his official announcement, DeSantis was doing everything he could to present the appearance of a presidential candidate, while leaving Donald Trump, the already announced candidate, to keep dunking on him in the media with little reprisal. DeSantis has become rather notorious in the media for refusing to do interviews. He also doesn’t talk very much with voters. So perhaps it’s understandable that when he wanted to make his big announcement, he gravitated to none other than Elon Musk, one of those bigwigs who seems increasingly comfortable with turning America into a corporate state but realizes that Donald Trump, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to that agenda. Of course the last year or so has demonstrated that Elon Musk, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to his own declared agenda. Over the last week, DeSantis’ campaign set up a big presentation announcing that Elon Musk was going to host DeSantis’ official campaign announcement Wednesday on… Twitter Spaces.
Did you know that Twitter Spaces was a thing? Yeah, neither did I. And apparently neither did anybody at Twitter, including Elon Musk. “The audio stream crashed repeatedly, making it virtually impossible for most users to hear the new presidential candidate in real time.” More than 20 minutes passed before the scheduled start time because of audio drop-offs and other technical issues. Musk insisted that the problems were because servers were crashing due to the attendance being so high.
If only Elon had a staff at Twitter that knew the system and could review performance issues in real time.
Even if everything had gone smoothly, the announcement was merely an audio feed with DeSantis giving a formal speech. The media reaction to the “event” exceeded the attendance of the event itself.
Donald Trump Jr. actually came up with a good one that ended up becoming the insult tag of the week: “#DeSaster”. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-New York) tweeted, “We had more people join when I played Among Us.”
Put it this way, Jason Johnson at MSDNC said “the Obamacare rollout looked better than this.”
Now with most of these competitors, Trump barely even bothers to acknowledge that a challenger exists. But he really seems hopped up about DeSantis. He takes him personally in a way that he wouldn’t with Scott or Nikki Haley. For various reasons. As a fellow Florida Man, DeSantis is technically Trump’s Governor and not only does Trump have to live under his authority, he’s also the main competition for the title of chief Florida Man. Plus, Trump can say, very accurately, that DeSantis needed his help and his endorsement to run for Governor the first time, to the extent that he was called a “mini-Trump.” On the other hand, in the 2022 off-year elections, DeSantis won re-election very handily without Trump’s help, even as Trump-endorsed candidates were tanking.
And course in order for Trump to really go after a target on Truf Censhal, he has to give them a demeaning little nickname. Like how he calls Chuck Schumer “Little Chuckie”, Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy” and Vladmir Putin “Oh My Precious Lord And Master In Whose Name I Live And Serve.”
Trump still seems to be casting about for the right nickname to give DeSantis. I like “Meatball Ron.” It just has a ring to it. I also like “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Cause it’s so accurate. And it almost sounds clever. Which is why I think Trump didn’t actually come up with that one. I also get that impression because he doesn’t use it too often, probably because it has too many syllables for Donnie to spell or pronounce regularly. He’s more likely to just call him “Ron DeSanctus”, which is just another case of Trump not bothering to spell correctly. But I also think that Trump has a team that monitors his social media posts for typographical errors, and if there aren’t enough of them, they add some in to make the argle-bargle look more “authentic.”
Serious question, independent of my personal feelings on Trump: If you are another Republican candidate for president, and your campaign platform is basically the same as Trump’s except for a couple of slogans or a personal history, then why are you running when you have a candidate who is already running, has already been President, and has a built-in following that you don’t have?
If you can give me a serious and credible answer to that question, I will take you seriously as a candidate.
More than likely though, most of Trump’s alleged rivals are either angling to be his 2024 running mate (which is the assumption about Nikki Haley) or have realized both that Trumpnik attitudes are predominant in the Republican Party but in order to win a general election, a candidate has to do a halfway imitation of a Homo Sapiens, and Trump gave up on that a while ago. The other issue with Trump’s campaign is implied: Why is he running for office as though he planned to follow the lawful procedure of elections, when he’s shown he’s going to do everything he can to ignore the results he doesn’t like, in such a way that even Georgia’s Secretary of State had to push back?
Contrary to what Senator Scott seems to think, the only choice in the post 2015 Republican Party is either Trumpism with Trump or Trumpism without Trump. Which is to say, someone like Ron DeSantis who is attempting to back away from Trump’s influence while being just as radical and reactionary, if not more so.
But as Bill Maher put it on March 10, “Why would you listen to a tribute band when the original act is still out there?” If this Party cared about winning general elections, they wouldn’t have gone with Trump in the first place. Half of the reason he did win is because James Comey decided to re-open an investigation on Hillary Clinton at exactly the wrong time for her. Most down ballot Republican candidates either refuse to admit it if they lose or run in districts that are so safe that the only real contest is for the Republican primary, which is another reason the Party as a whole doesn’t care about general elections. Why is there a surprise that they supported Trump’s insurrection against the Electoral College results? The main difference between Trump and any other potential Republican nominee for president is that all the other politicians might accept the result if they lose. We know for a fact that Trump will not.
Back in the days of Goldwater and Reagan, Republicans knew that they were unpopular, and so they thought their job was to make themselves popular by making their philosophies and policies more competitive, to appeal to the uncommitted and people on the other side and bring them over. These “conservatives” don’t want to do that. It’s just too hard. It would require thinking instead of feeling, and that’s no FUN. More’s the pity, because given the general unpopularity of leftist taxing and spending and the potential appeal of libertarian policies (if the woke Right ever took them seriously), the Right might still be competitive.
Trump has kept going back to an old MAGA slogan: “They’re not after me… they’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” Which like most Trump statements is the opposite of reality. The only reason the government hasn’t thrown Trump in a cell and thrown the cell away is because “YOU” (the Trump fan club) are in the way. No one is out to “get” Middle America. No one would care about the Trump base if they weren’t constantly enabling him to stay out of jail, so if they got out of the way of justice, nothing would happen to them. But I suspect that a lot of the cultists know this and that is exactly why they continue to worship such an unworthy master: Because otherwise no one would care about them.
Not the Democrats, who treat working-class America as “flyover country.” And certainly not the Republican establishment, who prior to 2015 would talk a good game about banning abortion, ending affirmative action or moving our Israel embassy to Jerusalem, but would always go with the centrist position for the general election because they still cared about liberal-bourgeois premises like “the candidate that gets the most votes wins the election.”
Of course the 2020 general election and 2022 midterms after Dobbs v. Mississippi made clear that it’s getting harder and harder to win a majority with Right-populist positions, with Republicans losing races they “shoulda” won because worship of Trump and his dogmas mattered more than what the general public wanted. In other words, it demonstrated why the establishment only paid lip service to the populist goals, because they knew better. But it doesn’t matter, because the Trumpniks run the show now. The Republican establishment lives in fear of their populist base, and not just figuratively. After all, before January 6, Republican politicians only assumed that any heresy against Our Lord and Savior would cause a bloodthirsty lynch mob to break into the Capitol to try and kill them. But now they KNOW.
The assumption of some political watchers is that Republicans are waiting for a deus ex machina to save them – if not the 78-year-old Trump getting a heart attack, then Jack Smith or one of these other guys putting him up on federal charges and winning. Here’s the joke, there’s no law saying a presidential candidate can’t run if they’re indicted, or arrested, or even convicted. That’s right, Trump could get convicted of felonies, and still win the election, at which point he could pardon himself, because at that point, who could tell him that he can’t? (In the abstract, this is actually a good thing, insofar as government in other countries has deliberately targeted opposition politicians with criminal charges specifically to keep them from running for office. It’s Putin’s standard procedure in Russia, and it’s what happened to Lula da Silva in Brazil before his case was overturned in the courts.) The only constitutional way to keep Trump out of office would have been to convict him in impeachment, and of course the Republican Party wouldn’t let that happen. Which gets to the point that if they really wanted to stop him, they would have, but they don’t because they would lose his fan club of AM radio and “reality” TV fans, which was what their voter base had turned into even before Trump became a politician.
Which gets to the real problem for these guys: Even if Trump somehow got taken out of contention during the presidential primary rounds, for the Republican Party that would be like if the German Army conspiracy had actually assassinated Hitler in 1944. (My apologies to Hitler for the comparison to Trump.) Seriously, if the conspirators had eliminated Hitler (and his support structure) they would have eliminated the fanatic stubbornness that was the main handicap to their planning, but they still would have been at war with an Allied coalition that by now was demanding unconditional surrender. And why did they? Because by that point Hitler had started a genocidal war with half the planet, and Germany had become too much of a threat to just be set back to “normal.” Remember, World War I ended after the Germans deposed the Kaiser and the Allies agreed to make peace and not invade the country. The Allies decided they couldn’t give the benefit of the doubt again. In 1918, Germany was merely reactionary and militarist (and they were hardly unique in that, frankly). In 1944, they were not only reactionary and militarist, they were enthralled to a radical collectivist philosophy that could not co-exist with the rest of the world. They had to be destroyed.
Even if Trump isn’t in the picture, the Republican Party is still the Party of Trump. It isn’t a party of low taxes and small government. It damn sure isn’t a party of “fiscal responsibility” to the extent it ever was. As much as the Right howls and screams about “socialism”, the reason Americans hate socialism is because socialism in practice is one party taking over the government, with that one party being controlled by one man, and that one man gets to decide for the rest of us what to think, what to say, where we’re allowed to go in public, what businesses are allowed to do, and how (or whether) we can pray. And THAT’s what the Republicans want for this country. And again, that’s not just Trump. That’s DeSantis.
Next year, they shouldn’t just be defeated. They should be outright destroyed. They should get their dick put in the dirt so deep that it fucks China.
What happens to Trump himself is at this point irrelevant. Again, giving him appropriate punishment for his scams is an independent issue from whether he becomes president again. He has to be defeated in court AND the ballot box. But the latter also involves defeating the movement that made him a threat, because it will continue without him. Whether he wants to admit it or not.