Ron DeSantis has really done it to himself now
Last week the CDC significantly relaxed outdoor mask guidelines, in the latest sign of how public policy is trending as mass vaccinations continue to reduce the threat of the pandemic. Instead of moving his state along this same national trajectory, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided today to forcibly kill off all locally enacted COVID protections in his state.
This is precisely why DeSantis has no future in politics. He’s not trying to give himself the appearance of being one step ahead of the curve. Instead he’s simply trying to be combative and antithetical to everyone else involved, because he watched Trump behave that way for four years. Of course Trump was savvily corrupt enough to usually understand which fights he could get away with picking. DeSantis, whose political IQ is closer to that of a rabid squirrel, doesn’t understand that. He’s just trying to randomly create chaos and division wherever possible, which has never been a viable strategy for winning elections.
All that DeSantis is doing is hurting himself. He’s giving his adversaries in Florida a series of strong talking points to use against him when he’s up for reelection in the state in 2022, in an election that’s looking more winnable for the Democrats by the day. He’s also continuing to make himself a national pariah, meaning that mainstream Americans in all fifty states will be working to defeat him in 2022.
If Ron DeSantis thinks that his increasingly random and antithetical behavior is somehow clearing a path for him to successfully run for President in 2024, then he’s even more delusionally stupid than we thought. What DeSantis is really doing is sabotaging his own chances of even making it past 2022. And in that regard, we say please proceed.
