The stealth “book tour” campaign is over, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially announced his run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday, after having the Florida legislature amend the state’s “Resign To Run” law (Fl. Statutes 99.012(4)(a)) to make it inapplicable to candidates running for President or Vice-President of the United States.1 DeSantis signed the amendment into law earlier in the day, before making his campaign launch announcement in a Twitter Spaces webcast hosted by Twitter CEO Elon Musk. President Trump reacted to the webcast’s initial technical difficulties with a video meme of one of SpaceX’s early Falcon 9 landing attempts.
I've been following several of DeSantis’ Twitter surrogates for quite a while now, and it seems that one of their big themes at the moment is how Gov. DeSantis’ response to the COVID pandemic is rightly celebrated (pardon the pun). The campaign attempts to draw a contrast with the federal response under President Trump, blaming him for "locking down the country."
But this is disingenuous on DeSantis' part, because President Trump's COVID policy was to support the states, allowing each state to set their own policies (albeit with strong criticism at times from his "bully pulpit"2). President Trump impressed me at the time for standing for federalism at a time when it was most challenging to do so.
The problem for DeSantis in this regard is that without President Trump's respect for federalism, Florida wouldn't have had its own policy for him to be running on now. The emergency powers the federal government has, through the administrative state, are quite formidable.3 While DeSantis took the (perceived) risk, and opened Florida sooner than many other governors, he still "followed The Science" set by Fauci and the CDC early on, including lockdowns and masking, and eagerly adopted the vaccines provided under Operation Warp Speed once they became available following the election.
DeSantis now seems to be flirting with the views of anti-vax voters as well, but dare not go too far in that direction, because he's on the record supporting Operation Warp Speed and COVID vaccine distribution.
Incidentally, as I mentioned in my earlier column assessing Biden, the coercive top-down federal approach that Biden ran on didn't work either. Does DeSantis really want to argue that we'd be better off without vaccines?
The information that policymakers around the world were working with in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic was often incomplete and erroneous, particularly the pandemic computer models, whose predictions rapidly diverged from reality, but were saved by on-the-fly "adjustments."
DeSantis seems to have attracted the support of a coalition of Never Trumpers, as well as genuine fans of his governance in Florida (where he's built Republican dominance in the legislature), and a few anti-vaxxers. He's had several advantages in Florida in addition to his legislative supermajority, most notably, there's no deep state in Florida dogging his every move, as President Trump had to contend with ever since he announced his own candidacy.
Is it realistic to expect that DeSantis, were he to be in the Oval Office, would be left alone by the treacherous permanent bureaucracy, or would he have to learn from scratch how to deal with the "six ways from Sunday" that the "intelligence community" can undermine a presidency, as Sen. Schumer (now the Senate majority leader) notoriously warned? He'd face much the same reaction, perhaps more so.
DeSantis' campaign, and many of his supporters, want to create the impression that President Trump is "unelectable," though he very narrowly lost during the extraordinary circumstances of COVID, which allowed for a proliferation of "emergency" changes to voting rules, ballot stuffing, "harvesting," and other irregularities --not to mention information warfare and Big Tech censorship.
DeSantis' policies aren't that different than President Trump's overall, though he does seem to be much more of a "culture warrior," with his now-famous feud with Disney, and his challenges to critical race and gender indoctrination in schools. He's distinguished himself on some important tech issues as well, talking about the threat of a central bank digital currency which could be used to impose a Chinese-style social credit system. However, DeSantis' recent fan, Twitter's Elon Musk, says he wants to convert his acquisition (now internally called X) into an "everything app," which seems to me evocative of the Chinese WeChat (微信), which incorporates a payment system, video calls, and Twitter-like microblogging, among other features. Musk has a significant market presence in China with Tesla, and his critics have said that China could exert that leverage over Musk to affect Twitter/X.
DeSantis' surrogates and supporters on Twitter have meanwhile amplified DeSantis' accusation that President Trump is running to the left of DeSantis on some issues. Or is it the case that Trump has stood where he's been, on his pragmatic and flexible MAGA ideology, while DeSantis has run to the right, particularly on cultural issues, mirroring the @SwipeWright meme Elon Musk shared of how his "fellow liberal" ran off to the far left, leaving him seemingly on the "conservative" side?
It's very true that President Trump is not an ideological conservative in the sense that the "movement" conservatives which took over the Republican Party with Reagan were, but rather his "national greatness"-based MAGA ideology has its antecedents in the Eisenhower era, where great national construction projects like the Interstate Highway System helped build the United States' post-WWII prosperity.4 Voters knew that Donald Trump wasn’t a “movement” conservative when they elected him the first time.5 The Democrats, who once were anti-Communist and advocated for greatness as well (e.g. racing the Soviets to the Moon), have been hollowed out from within by Marxist theories, into something unrecognizable.
DeSantis recognizes what the identity politics-obsessed Democrats stand for now is nothing more than divide and rule, divide up the scraps, and “manage the decline.” The administrative state in Washington, DC has been captured, and has already tried to destroy one President. Can DeSantis defeat the fighter who's already faced that, and continues to face that, and whose supporters want to see a rematch?
That's the most difficult triangulation of all, and it's tough to be a challenger when you have to attract Trump voters to have a chance at sitting in the White House. Go too harsh, and that slips away, and you sound like the relentlessly dishonest negative campaign that's been waged against President Trump for years.
I suspect there are a significant number of Republicans in Florida that want to keep Gov. DeSantis in Tallahassee, so he faces that challenge in winning his home state. By most accounts, he's way behind the nationwide polls for the nomination, though he is the designated challenger, since President Trump has been attacking DeSantis throughout his "book tour" stealth campaign (to the point of seeming irrationality).
What many Trump voters want is justice, and because justice doesn't appear to be forthcoming (at least in this life), the ballot box will have to do.
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By its terms, the Florida law requires candidates for federal office who are presently Florida state officials to submit an irrevocable resignation from their current office at least 10 days prior to qualifying to run for another office, to be effective no later than the date they would take office if elected.
The term “bully pulpit” was popularized by President Teddy Roosevelt to illustrate the persuasive power of the office of the President, but its actual meaning is lost on many modern readers due to the slang use of “bully” to mean “excellent” having fallen out of favor since the beginning of the 20th Century. Kids today might say that being the President “slaps” as a way to get attention for your views.
Among them, such things as the Defense Production Act, which gave the President authority to compel private businesses to produce needed health care supplies.
Some DeSantis surrogates and supporters, including campaign spokeswoman Christina Pushaw (who I have a great deal of respect for), seem to have adopted Ann Coulter’s pedantic talking point that President Trump “didn’t build” the border wall. "Re-building" is building, if the previous barrier was inadequate, which it was.
To a certain extent, the furor in the Republican Party that “Trump isn’t a conservative!” may have actually helped him get elected in 2016, at a time when many voters had soured on the “conservative” label due to self-identified “conservatives” not doing enough to stop President Obama’s radicalism, and some sneering at (or working to suppress) the populist “Tea Party” movement.
The Florida Triangulation
Yep. DeSantis is seen as a winning warrior but in reality he has a republican stronghold in the Florida legislature that agrees with him. Trump had to fight, and is still fighting, for EVERYTHING. He’s even had to fight the RINOs. I don’t think that is something DeSantis has the intestinal fortitude to do. I see him as another Bush or Romney. He will go along to get along.
If De Santis continues to govern well in Florida, a future year could be his year. if he falters, he could lose it all. Remember the hype about Scott Walker? His presidential campaign was awkward. He continued as governor and where is he now? De Santis may be better off waiting.