I find it interesting that we’re staring to see Trump pitching slurs against DeSantis. It’s pretty clear that the whole USP for DeSantis is “Trumpism without Trump”, and the only way for Trump himself to strike back against that is to say that the governor of Florida is not a real true believer. It’s pitched at the level of a third grade schoolyard spat – but then, that’s the intellectual level of Republican politics for the last quarter-century or more.
The standout feature of this kind of politics is how much it relies on not only stupidity, but weakness. Donald Trump prevailed over a field of fifteen other candidates simply because none of them could get traction in that huge a swamp, and therefore all of them were waiting for someone else to fail. And they all thought ”well Trump will lose eventually, and I can pick up his supporters and vault to the top of the pack.” And that is the weakness. Everyone is afraid to stand up to Trump, to stand up to those who support him. Had just one candidate confronted him and said “you’re wrong and you’re going to lose it all for us, and I’m not having it”, and had the Never Trump people all rallied behind this single candidate, and had the press not been high on the daily fart of another Trump appearance, he never could have won the nomination.
But everyone was too weak to stand up to him until it was too late. And now, here you have DeSantis. DeSantis, who won Florida by twenty points in the middle of the biggest Republican national El Foldo in a midterms in decades. DeSantis, who the New York Times is dying to anoint as Not Trump (speaking of stupid and weak, but we’ll get to that). DeSantis, who has made no secret of wanting to be the nominee in 2024 and whose entire policy program revolves around giving Fox News viewers special feelings in their chicken parts. And he will not denounce Trump. He will not tell off Trump. He is standing on the bridge of the ship while Trump teeters on the plank and he doesn’t have the balls to push him, because he is terrified that personal attachment to a whining Yankee who is electoral poison is somehow a greater draw in the South than open racism and hippie-punching.
Stupid and weak.
And that’s the other thing we come back to. The GOP has won any national success in the last twenty-five years on gerrymandering, technicalities and war panic. Trump is not that popular. His policies are not that popular. And yet, for fear of his supporters, the mainstream press insists on telling us how much we all hate Joe Biden, how much we all hate Hillary Clinton, how bad the economy is and how out of control inflation is – when individual commodity prices can be easily shown to be a product of supply chain breakdown, or avian flu (for eggs), or OPEC manipulation (for gas), and when corporations are laying off employees by the thousands at a time when profits are through the roof. Yet after fifty years of being mau-mau’d by the right, the stalwarts of the mainstream media are in thrall to providing they’re not liberal and as a result bend over backwards to tongue-bathe the most easily disproven liars among us.
Stupid and weak.
And it’s no wonder that Trump’s strongest state is Alabama. The state of the big mules, the state of company coal towns and sharecropper scamming, the state where the poor have to be kept down below the salt in the pickle barrel so that Alabama Power and TCI and Blue Cross and Georgia Pacific can have their way with a nice healthy bidness environment. A state where the great and the good have fallen about themselves for decades to keep people weak and stupid and offer them nothing in return but Baptist-fried racism and the promise that you’re better off than the darkies and your reward is coming in the next world. It is a mentality that the GOP has taken national with Trump as its flag-bearer: you just believe whatever we say and we will give you someone to shit on.
Stupid and weak.
Because what’s the platform at this point? What are the issues? What are the things that are the highest priority? Trans people are gross and icky? The cops should be allowed to do murder without explanation or consequence? White people should never be limited in how much firepower they can accumulate? Children must never find out that someone might be different from them – or worse, that they might be different from someone else?
Stupid. And. Weak.
I don’t want to live in a country where stupid and weak is aspirational.