#MAGA exteremism

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

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DeSantis drops out of GOP primary campaign.

Ron DeSantis nearly destroyed Florida in his attempt to prove that he is meaner and more extreme than Trump without the craziness of Trump. It didn’t work, as an editorial in the Miami Herald noted on Sunday evening: DeSantis was supposed to save the GOP from Trump, not endorse him

Per the Herald,

It’s not just that he was steamrolled by Donald Trump. DeSantis never appeared to want to save the GOP. He was more interested in making it a more ravenous, angrier and intolerant party. That worked for Trump, but didn’t work for the governor with all the charisma of burned toast. So now DeSantis’ presidential campaign has ended. But the damage of the laws he has pushed through in Florida, as he landed more appearances on Fox News, will live on. Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be “Don’t say gay,” woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars.

DeSantis has fallen in line behind other Republicans to “kiss the ring” of Trump—even though DeSantis railed against Trump sycophants only a week ago. DeSantis said,

You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring he'll say your wonderful.

Six days later, DeSantis “kissed Trump's ring” by endorsing Trump in the same announcement in which DeSantis suspended his campaign. And, on cue, Trump responded by saying “Ron” (rather than “DeSanctimonious”) was a “gracious” candidate who ran a good campaign.

There will undoubtedly be a lot of good analyses about the reasons for Ron DeSantis’s failure, and I look forward to sharing them with you. Tonight, I want to add what I see as a glimmer of hope in DeSantis’s political demise.

To begin, DeSantis was a miserable candidate because people understood he was disingenuous, cruel, and angry. Let’s agree on that fact and move on.

DeSantis fashioned himself as “Trump but competent.” Accepting that premise, the rejection of DeSantis shows that the support for Trump isn’t really about his policies (or his competency). It is about personal support for Trump. That’s good! Why? It suggests that if we can get past the latest (and last) effort by Trump to take the presidency, running on his policies is not enough to garner more than a few thousand votes in Iowa. (No disrespect to Iowa.)

This theory is discussed by Zack Beauchamp in Vox, Ron DeSantis got the Republican Party wrong. Beauchamp writes,

DeSantis was betting that Trumpism could be separated from Trump: that enough of the GOP’s radical factions wanted the right-wing populism without the chaos of the man who brought it to dominance in the party.

When Trump is finally gone, we will see a raft of Trump wannabes in the style of Ron DeSantis come to the fore—Don Jr., Mike Flynn, Matt Gaetz, etc. They will run on Trump's policies, but that won’t be enough. They are not Trump.

All of this suggests that there may be the remnant of a political movement that can rise from the ashes of the GOP to form a different, new party that sheds itself of MAGA extremism as it leaves Trump in the rear-view mirror.

The above is a bit fuzzy and inchoate, but the failure of DeSantis should be reassuring. If DeSantis gained traction and appeared as a serious contender for election in 2024, we could have been looking at another eight years of MAGA extremism in the presidency.

If we beat Trump in 2024—and we can—the Trump wannabes don’t appear to have the toxic brew that runs through Trump's veins. This is why we should do everything possible to defeat Trump at the ballot box in 2024. Doing so may foreclose the last chance for a MAGA extremist to gain the presidency.

To be sure, MAGA extremism will endure in the states and in Congress, but we will have avoided the threat to democracy of Trump (or an imitator) as president. That matters a lot.

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