Don Surber

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Thursday, December 01, 2022

They’ll dump on DeSantis. They already have

So the DC Commentariat is pushing DeSantis as an alternative to Trump. National Review is demanding we “Draft DeSantis.”

It argued, “We need to Draft DeSantis for 2024. The infrastructure for his run is already being put in place, and the tide might be turning against 45. DeSantis isn’t perfect, but there’s a strong case that he is the only viable alternative to the ongoing self-immolation of the Republican Party in Trump’s hands.”Where’s my “Sure, Jan” GIF or the one of Ron Burgundy saying, “I don’t believe you,” because back in April when DeSantis took on Disney, National Review was clucking its tongue.

It admonished, “Ron DeSantis’s Misguided Attack on Disney’s Legal Status.”

The argument was we should play nice with people who run the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate going along with people who used captive audiences of kindergarteners to groom children for assorted sexual depravities.

In another column, it condemned removing Disney special status, saying, “Using the state as a vehicle to reward friends and punish enemies is something that conservatives once excoriated, for good reason, as Gangster Government.”

Um, but Disney was rewarded with the special status by a Republican governor.

But what are facts when you are faking being a conservative?

The press assumes DeSantis will run for president. His new book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, debuts February 28. A book presages a presidential bid according to the experts in DC. Maybe they are right this time.

Liberals already are writing their Worse Than Trump posts.

The Atlantic reported, “While essentially working from home, DeSantis has managed to build an impressive cachet as a favored Fox News funambulist, a flypaper for big donors, and an owner of libs. He has fashioned a kind of GOP utopia in the Sunshine State—where the boss himself chooses to reside, but is safely cordoned off in Palm Beach. DeSantis, meanwhile, clearly runs the empire. ‘Florida is where woke goes to die,’ he said in his chest-thumping victory speech on Election Night.

“The question is whether DeSantis’s presidential hopes will perish as he starts getting out more on the Iowa–New Hampshire dating apps. People who know him better and have watched him longer are skeptical of his ability to take on the former president. DeSantis, they say, is no thoroughbred political athlete. He can be awkward and plodding. And Trump tends to eviscerate guys like that.” 

And the usual Never Trump clods are at work on DeSantis. Rick Wilson threw shade on DeSantis beating former governor Charlie Crist by 19 points.

New York magazine sees the clamor for DeSantis for what it is: another elitist attempt to Dump Trump.

In its “The Republican Elite Makes Its Move Against Trump. Ready for DeSantis” column, it said, “DeSantis has consolidated the support of the conservative movement by courting its most right-wing elements. He wooed insurrectionists, QAnon enthusiasts, and anti-vaxxers, the last of which is a constituency that has allowed him to run to the right of Trump, who is saddled with the liability of having created Operation Warp Speed. At the National Conservatism Conference, the party’s semi-fascist wing believed the American version of Viktor Orbán was not Trump but DeSantis.

“The conventional wisdom all this time has held that Trump would simply bully DeSantis or anybody who stood in his path, just as he humiliated the likes of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. But this belief relies on the lazy assumption that whatever dynamic pertained in the last contested Republican primary would automatically continue. DeSantis has the advantage of a unified conservative-movement apparatus behind him, which Trump’s rotating cast of 2016 opponents never enjoyed.”

We shall see how this plays out but whatever love for DeSantis the establishment has for DeSantis today will be gone once he is nominated because he does not play nice.

Posted by Don Surber at Thursday, December 01, 2022