It’s time we talk about about how far clueless weakling Ron DeSantis is in over his head
Donald Trump is on the verge of being criminally indicted in multiple jurisdictions, and is pretty obviously not going to be a viable participant in the 2024 election. But Ron DeSantis has made it pretty clear that once Trump is taken off the table, DeSantis will attempt to run in 2024.
Here’s the thing about DeSantis. He’s a monster who’s willing to do evil things – to the country, to LGBT children, you name it – to try to make himself look powerful. But DeSantis is also, frankly, an idiot. He’s in wildly over his head. Many of the things he keeps throwing at the wall in Florida are either so unpopular he has to walk them back, or impossible threats that he never ends up even trying to act on. He’s the walking definition of a paper tiger – which is fitting, since he has all the personality of cardboard.
If Trump’s personality was one dimensional – you either loved or hated him right off the bat – DeSantis has no personality at all. For that matter, if Trump’s political savvy was one dimensional, in the sense that he relied on nothing but brute force to try to carry out his agenda, then DeSantis has no political savvy at all.
DeSantis is essentially an evil but inept drifter who found the Trump playbook at a swap meet and has been trying to follow it, but doesn’t really understand any of what he’s trying to mimic. It’s why DeSantis’ various attempts at showing he’s powerful and evil have been even messier than those of Trump. Trump at least knew what image he wanted to give off, and how to go about being his evil self. DeSantis is left to randomly guess how Trump went about being Trump.
So here’s the problem. The entire mainstream media – left, right, and center – has been shamelessly hyping Ron DeSantis for two years straight. The right paints him as a savvy rising hero, the left paints him as an evil genius villain, and the center simply paints him as being inevitable. Each of these media narratives is based solely on what’s most likely to get the highest ratings from that media outlet’s specific audience. And they’re all fictional takes.
Nothing – not one move that DeSantis has made since he first took office – has in any way suggested that he’s politically savvy or that he understands what he’s trying to do. Yet the entire mainstream media and pundit class has uniformly and fictionally portrayed DeSantis as being a super smart politician who knows exactly what he’s doing, and will get away with every evil and ambitious thing he ever attempts to do.
It’s stunning how willing the media is to portray a fictional version of DeSantis, simply because it’s good for ratings and page views. It’s even more stunning how that fictional version of DeSantis ends up being exactly the same across the entire media spectrum. Different media outlets will alternately portray him as heroic or evil, but they all identically portray him as super smart, super savvy, and guaranteed to always magically get his way no matter what.
This version of Ron DeSantis does not exist. In reality he’s a bumbling insecure clown who keeps having to reverse himself in his ongoing battle with Disney World. He’s been trying to thread the needle in such a way that it gives off the appearance that he omnipotently crushed Disney for daring to get in his way, without actually pushing his Disney feud so far that it harms Florida’s economy. It would take a master evil genius to pull off that kind of balance, and DeSantis keeps proving that he has no such skills whatsoever.
More to the point, DeSantis still hasn’t figured out what made Trump tick. Every fight that Trump ever picked, every petty feud that he ever started, was calculated to help him appeal to his target audience. Trump would make a point of trying to start a feud with a Black public official as opposed to a white public official, for instance, because he knew that would make him look good in the eyes of his racist base. Trump surely hated the people he publicly feuded with, but it was always a means to an end, because Trump was a true sociopath.
DeSantis, on the other hand, seems to just get baited into feuding with whoever happens to insult him or whoever gets under his skin. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s no strategy. That’s because Trump, the evil bastard, was smart at carrying out this kind of blunt force villainy. Ron DeSantis is just an inept weakling who’s trying to overcompensate because he’s desperately afraid that everyone is going to figure out that he’s an inept weakling, but he has no idea how to pull it off.
Yet even in spite of how obvious it is that DeSantis is a clueless weakling who’s throwing blind punches at random and hoping to hit something, the entire mainstream media and pundit class is spending every day trying to convince audiences that DeSantis is somehow “Donald Trump but smarter.”
It’s a pretty good tactic by the media, in terms of inventing ratings-friendly narratives, if you think about it. Take the dumbest guy in all of politics, who’s drowning in his own inability to land a punch no matter how many swings he takes, and instead convince audiences that they’re not really seeing what they’re seeing. Instead of this idiot being an idiot, he’s somehow a political genius who knows exactly what he’s doing. And – this part of the lie is crucial to the media’s success in milking this kind of fictional narrative – DeSantis is going to succeed no matter what.
Again, it doesn’t matter what “side” any given media outlet or pundit has positioned themselves on. Left leaning media outlets portray DeSantis as evil, smart, powerful, and inevitable – which leaves left leaning audiences staring at their screen in paralyzed fear. Right leaning media outlets portray DeSantis as heroic, smart, powerful, and inevitable – which leaves right leaning audiences staring at their screen in inspired hope. All that matters is that everyone on all sides is transfixed into believing that the only way to deal with DeSantis is to stare at their screens all day.
Meanwhile back in the real world, there’s a reason why Trump is still well ahead of DeSantis in most 2024 Republican primary polls, even though everyone knows by now that Trump is going to be in the clink before we even get to 2024. Trump is a washed up has-been. He’s toast. And yet the media is having such a hard time selling DeSantis’ inevitability, it still can’t get people to move on from clinging to the imaginary hope that Trump might somehow magically survive three criminal trials.
But that’s just the beginning of the problem. For decades there has been this persistent, if clinically insane, notion on the left that sitting around and staring in fear at your screen while chanting some form of “The other side is going to get its way no matter what” somehow constitutes activism and vigilance. In reality it’s the precise opposite. If you’re just staring at your screen all day, you’re doing literally nothing to help your side’s cause. And if you’re staring at your screen and then telling anyone who will listen that the other side is going to win no matter what, you’ve basically become the publicity department for the other side.
After all, a guy like Ron DeSantis bases his entire strategy and gameplan one just one narrative: selling himself as powerful, strong, and inevitable. Someone like DeSantis loves it – loves it – when scaredy cat liberal activists run around yelling “Oh no, DeSantis is all powerfully evil, he’s going to get his way no matter what!” That’s free advertising for him. He doesn’t care that liberals are calling him evil. All that matters is that liberals, his enemies, are helping to confirm to everyone out there that he is in fact powerful.
It’s why the types on our side who run around yelling “Oh no we’re doomed” or “Oh no, the Republicans are going to get their way no matter what” end up doing so much extraordinary harm with this kind of defeatist rhetoric. They’re telling their fellow liberal activists not to bother even trying to fight and win against the next monster like DeSantis. They’re telling folks on the right that they should go ahead and line up behind DeSantis because he’s powerful. And they’re telling folks in the middle that they might as well get on board because the reign of DeSantis is inevitable.
That all sounds completely insane, of course. It’s why running around talking about how you’re going to lose, or how the other side is going to get its way no matter what, is literally insane behavior. It’s an overt attempt at causing your own side to lose. Ten seconds of critical thought and it becomes so painfully obvious why this kind of messaging just delivers votes to the other side on a silver platter. But then you go back to looking at your screen, and you’re back to the media endlessly and unanimously telling you that you’re not being “vigilant” unless you’re talking about how an inept moron like Ron DeSantis is instead a genius who’s going to win no matter what.
Step one in taking down Ron DeSantis is to stop doing public relations for him. Stop helping him spread his preferred narrative that he’s powerful, savvy, and inevitable. Just by no longer helping him push that narrative, you’re already weakening him. And if you really want to weaken him, start spreading the factual truth about him: he’s an insecure idiot who’s wildly overcompensating for the fact that he has no idea what he’s even trying to do. That’s the narrative that’ll brand him a loser, cause right wingers to give up on him, and take his power away. For all of the endless complexities of modern politics, pulling the plug on a clueless weakling like Ron DeSantis really is as simple as exposing for all to see that he is in fact a clueless weakling. The entirety of his strategy is based in trying to portray himself as strong. Expose him as weak and it’s over for him.
