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Last week, the New York Times reported that “President Donald J. Trump has been grumbling quietly to friends and visitors to his Palm Beach mansion about a rival Republican power center in another Florida mansion, some 400 miles to the north. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man Mr. Trump believes he put on the map, has been acting far less like an acolyte and more like a future competitor, Mr. Trump complains. With his stock rising fast in the party, the governor has conspicuously refrained from saying he would stand aside if Mr. Trump runs for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.” New York Times
The right praises Desantis but is skeptical that there is a major feud between the two party leaders.
“The scale of the clash shouldn’t be exaggerated… But the Trump-DeSantis storyline is inherently alluring… Some version of what DeSantis represents has the greatest odds of coaxing the party away from Trump and forging a new political synthesis that bears the unmistakable stamp of Trump while jettisoning his flaws…
“This critique of Trump wouldn’t be that he tweeted foolish things or violated norms or disgraced himself after the 2020 election. It would be, for example, that he elevated Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, early in the pandemic and listened to his advice for too long…
“The case against Trump would be that, despite all his talk of building the border wall, he didn’t get it done and left a desperately flawed immigration system intact, even though he had two years of a Republican Congress. That he rattled China’s cage but didn’t make fundamental changes to the U.S. trading relationship and said things that were much too complimentary of President Xi Jinping. That, finally, he lost to Joe Biden, a desperately flawed candidate who only made it into the White House because Trump made himself so unpopular.”
Rich Lowry, Politico
“For the duration of the response, DeSantis always took the lead in announcing Covid policy. Trump outsourced his Covid policymaking to Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the healthcare bureaucracy. By the time it went sideways—because it solely focused on eradicating a virus that was never getting eliminated—it was too late. The media was solidly on the side of Fauci and Birx simply because their narrative opposed Trump’s…
“[Now] rather than giving the media (that he supposedly detests) fodder to divide Republicans by making every member of the GOP take a side, maybe Trump should knock it off. There is an election in 2022 before anyone needs to worry about 2024. Plus, he’s getting in the age range where buying green bananas is risky. Perhaps he should consider taking on the role of the America First kingmaker rather than sending the country careening toward a grudge match with Hillary Clinton in 2024. Trump’s pride and need for fealty do not supersede the need to maintain GOP leadership in Florida and retake the House to end the disastrous Biden agenda.”
Stacey Lennox, PJ Media
Others note, “I called former national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien, who has been down to Mar-a-Lago and on the phone with the former president. Had he heard this chatter? O’Brien went on the record: ‘I’ve never heard any such thing,’ he declared on my radio show Thursday… I also checked in with longtime DeSantis supporters. Sources close to the governor confirm O’Brien’s account: ‘There is no conflict. Zero tension.’…
“Addiction is a terrible thing to break, and Trump addiction is particularly strong among scribblers and talking heads. But, as for the alleged feud, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there’s no there there. Yes, everyone would like to have a do-over on virus response. DeSantis’s musings about what he might have done differently in 2020 got catapulted from a serious reflection by a serious man into a tawdry bit of nonnews, especially compared to the real deal of ‘minor incursion.’”
Hugh Hewitt, Washington Post
The left is critical of Desantis’s record as governor of Florida.
The left is critical of Desantis’s record as governor of Florida.
“Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, won the governor’s mansion in 2018 in a tight election. Donald Trump carried the state handily in 2016 and 2020. Election officials reported results efficiently, enabling networks to call these races on election night. Mr. DeSantis himself declared that the state sets ‘the gold standard’ in election administration…
“[He] nevertheless wants state lawmakers to pony up $6 million to hire 52 people for his election police squad — which, naturally, would be under the governor’s control and would investigate allegations of election crimes submitted by ‘government officials or any other person.’…
“This would chill legitimate election work. In this, Mr. DeSantis’s proposal would be similar to an anti-voting law Texas lawmakers passed recently, which would threaten election workers with criminal penalties for transgressions as mild as proactively offering voters mail-in ballot applications. In both cases, the effect is to intimidate people into thinking twice about doing anything they fear state authorities might construe as illegal… The system as it stands has kept fraud vanishingly rare in the United States. Proposals such as Mr. DeSantis’s would only work to poison America’s democracy.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“The authoritarian impulse has been a hallmark of DeSantis’s tenure since the beginning. Last April, he signed an ‘anti-rioting’ law that was one of the most sweeping attacks on the right to protest in memory. Among other things, it offers civil liability protection to those who mow down protesters with their cars, and would allow peaceful protesters to be charged with a felony if other people at a protest they attended committed an act of violence…
“[Last week Raul Pino, the director of the Florida Department of Health in Orange County, was] ‘placed on administrative leave, and the Florida Department of Health is conducting an inquiry to determine if any laws were broken in this case.’ Because he encouraged public health workers to be vaccinated… Pino didn’t impose a mandate on anyone. His email was asking, pleading, begging people to get vaccinated — not requiring them to do so…
“DeSantis [has] called Florida ‘the freest state in these United States’… Unless, that is, the freedom you’re interested in involves encouraging people to get vaccinated, protecting your employees and customers from a pandemic, teaching history honestly, voting, protesting or anything else Republicans might not want you to do.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“We’re 10 months away from the midterm elections. Desperate for a contest—any contest—most media outlets find DeSantis’s growing profile delectable…
“And yet the nature of the feud itself says a great deal about how much the politics of Covid-19 have shifted in the year since Trump left office. Trump has, over the past year, been—at least by the dismal standards of the right—a hype man for vaccines. DeSantis, meanwhile, has recently embraced vaccine skepticism and refused to disclose his own status. The result is… a rare instance in which Trump is ‘out-of-step with the hardline elements of his party’s base.’ It also points to the growing potency of vaccine hesitancy on the right, as well as a potential fault line in upcoming elections in 2022 and 2024.”
Alex Shepard, New Republic
Alien-like sculptures sliced by ice and winds on Lake Michigan beach.
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