On Wednesday, Ron DeSantis did the most unsurprising thing in his political career: he announced he is running for president.
I’m running for president to lead our Great American Comeback. pic.twitter.com/YmkWkLaVDg
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) May 24, 2023
There is a temptation, one that is widespread among Republican voters — even among many of those who are sticking with Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee — to see DeSantis as an antidote to the utter nastiness that American politics became during the four years Trump was in office. (READ MORE: The Fraudulent Disney–DeSantis Narrative)
And that temptation wasn’t unreasonable. After all, nobody went through the kind of abuse Trump did.
We know thanks to the Durham report that Trump had an active coup d’etat attempted against him from before his election to after the midterms his party lost. We’ve seen a kangaroo-court indictment in New York for behavior that is clearly not a crime, a kangaroo-court lawsuit by a quite apparently crazy woman who alleged without evidence that he had raped and defamed her — and the same woman is now threatening to sue him in the same kangaroo court for making irritated statements about the trial. We’ve seen his home raided for supposedly classified documents that by their nature were declassified when he used his presidential power to take them from the White House; this is part of another kangaroo-court indictment to come.
And that doesn’t even include the idiocy brewing against Trump in Georgia.
This follows after he was slandered by the Democrat Party and its media shills for perfectly reasonable and accurate comments about what happened in Charlottesville in 2017, and after he was impeached not once but twice for things he didn’t do.
It’s been a hurricane since Trump’s arrival on the political scene, and lots of Americans are exhausted. Trump himself is exhausting at times.
But here’s what you’re going to learn if you don’t already know it, now that DeSantis is in the race: this really is not about Donald Trump.
It’s about the Left in America. It’s about the fact that those who took over the Democrat Party with Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency have metastasized it into a perpetual-motion Alinskyite political wrecking machine. It never stops, it never lets up, and it shows no mercy.
To oppose the Left is to be slimed, defamed, abused, and brutalized. Dumping Trump won’t make that go away.
The last column in this space had a couple of good examples of how this directly impacts DeSantis, namely the stupid narrative that he’s “losing” his fight against the woke groomers at Disney and the even stupider narrative that, according to the NAACP, Florida is a racist place unsafe for black travelers.
On the day DeSantis announced, there was an even more breathless attack:
Throughout his political career , DeSantis has made decisions and enacted policies that have only furthered his dangerous agenda and targeted hard-working Black people, vulnerable communities, and our children.
Here are a few bills that paint the picture – DeSantis is the worst nightmare for ALL of us.
- In Florida alone, there are over 2 million students who are enrolled in public schools compared to the 400 thousand in private schools, and yet the HB 1 bill (supported by DeSantis) is designed to defund Florida public schools and supply 4 BILLION to private charter schools. More school choice is good for Black families, but effectively defunding traditional public schools, a main gateway for education for so many Black children, does not increase school choice.
- With gun violence at an all-time high, DeSantis wants to lower the legal age to purchase a rifle from 21 to 18 years old with the HB 1543 bill – yes, that’s completely disregarding the 131 mass shootings that have occurred just this year. In 2018, advocates fought hard to increase the legal age to 21 after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Remarkably, since it passed, there has not been another school shooting in the state of Florida. Why on earth would DeSantis want to go backwards on this issue? His priorities are corrupt, just like him.
- Black women are constantly denied resources, services, and information needed to make personal decisions regarding their reproductive health, and still, DeSantis has for the better half of this year focused on a law that bans abortions after 6 weeks of pregnancy. We don’t need another presidential candidate that fails to understand that decisions regarding reproductive health care should be left up to those who are pregnant and their doctors – DeSantis, a privileged white man, knows nothing about pregnancy.
Now you can understand why we need all the support we can get. DeSantis has used the state of Florida as a playground to aggressively enact laws that will devastate Black communities – just imagine what he’ll do to the rest of the country if given the opportunity.
That’s from the Black Lives Matter PAC.
The narrative on Ron DeSantis is going to be that he’s a virulent racist who’s actively trying to oppress blacks, gays, transpeople, and women, and his policies — most of which are supported even by most Democrats in Florida – will literally murder people.
If you’ll remember, they said this same crap about Trump and before him they said it about Mitt Romney. Harry Reid, the American politician of the past century who most deserves his current residence in hell, slandered Romney as a tax dodger on the floor of the Senate. A Romney fundraising dinner was infiltrated by a left-wing activist who recorded him remarking about the 47 percent of the public who don’t pay income tax in what sounded like a critical statement of their value. And when he made a harmless, if awkward, remark during a debate about the “binders full of women,” meaning resumes of women being considered for jobs in his administration as governor of Massachusetts, it was trumpeted as evidence of what a misogynist he was.
DeSantis is going to be viciously, relentlessly slimed for the next year of his life, or however long he’s a presidential candidate. And if he isn’t the Republican nominee, and the odds are that he won’t be, given Trump’s current lead in the polls, the same people smearing him nonstop will claim victory of a permanent kind; they’re going to say his political career is over and that he’s been destroyed.
Of course, nobody is more aggressive in assaulting DeSantis than Trump. A few days ago, he actually claimed that New York’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo, who killed thousands of senior citizens by injecting COVID patients into nursing homes and spreading the infection to the most vulnerable, had somehow done a better job than DeSantis in dealing with the virus. It’s sure to get worse from that corner.
That said, there was this on Wednesday:
Last week, Piers Morgan, writing at the New York Post, compared DeSantis to Muhammad Ali in his famous 1974 “rope-a-dope” fight against George Foreman. Morgan might be correct in his phrasing. It isn’t impossible for DeSantis to eclipse Trump and win the nomination, and there are in fact decent arguments for why that’s a desirable result.
But the analogy fails because DeSantis isn’t just in the ring with Trump. He and Trump are both in the ring against an army of smear merchants, tyrants, demagogues, and worse.
The Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2024 elections. They’ve turned politics into a real-life game of thrones, where you either win or die.
So the fight will be dirtier and more intense than ever. And as a candidate Democrats fear more than Trump (if you buy into David Catron’s idea that there is a media pump-and-dump operation afoot where Trump is concerned, which your author is persuaded by), Ron DeSantis is about to be abused as no political candidate ever has been in American history.
If he can survive it, he might become one of the greats.
But this assumes Morgan is right to compare him to Muhammad Ali. And it’s far too soon to assume that.
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