NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I f you want to lay out all the words Donald Trump said about Ron DeSantis this week, and diagram the arguments, like a pencil-neck who reads — or worse, writes for — National Review, well, you’re wasting your time. B doesn’t follow A, and C and D aren’t premises; they’re just the first letters of two different four-letter words. The weapons are in the English language, but this is not a rule-bound duel of reasoning, like an Oxford debate. It’s a dirty brawl. There’s a difference, and if you don’t get that by now, you’re going to misunderstand everything from here on out.
So, no — it doesn’t actually matter that one day Donald Trump is begging DeSantis to say something on the impending charges from Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, putting DeSantis in the role of protector, only the next day to turn around and try to recast him as an ingrate. And no, it doesn’t matter that in one breath Donald Trump says Florida is great but only because of the sun and the ocean. And in the next breath he portrays it as a “sh**hole country” that DeSantis has run into the ground. And it’s not supposed to make any sense when he blames DeSantis for closing the beaches and calls him Lockdown Ron, only to then blame DeSantis for Covid deaths.
When you’re in a political argument with someone, you might punch your opponent only from the right, because the right is the space you want to occupy. Donald Trump is not starting a political argument with Ron DeSantis — he’s fighting for his political life. So of course he’s hitting him from right and left simultaneously, trying to pummel him. The intended effect is just to remind anti-lockdowners that Ron once locked things down. And to remind Covid hawks that he opened up before anyone else.
If Donald Trump were an artificial intelligence, he would use the supercomputer underneath that mane to determine the one sentence that could make each and every Republican primary voter dislike Ron DeSantis. If that produced 25 million contradictory sentences, he would unhesitatingly shout each one with equal conviction until every single primary voter couldn’t forget the one aimed at himself.
Parsing any of Trump’s attacks and working out what Trump’s views and policies will be is literally like trying to divine the future from the way debris lies after a mudslide.
The conservative pencil-neck — the guy like me — is tempted to despair of the Republican electorate. My brain sees all the contradictions not just between what Trump says in one Truth posting and another, but all the contradictions with his actions past, present, and future. People of my ilk are therefore tempted to believe that Republican voters who like Trump do not care about policy, do not care about rationality, or decency. They just want to be entertained.
If you want to see someone defeat his opponents with facts and logic, watch a Ben Shapiro video. Trump is not trying to win you over with logic; he’s demonstrating his sheer cussed willfulness. It’s that willfulness that his voters fantasize about putting to work protecting them. That willfulness works for him.
Try to describe Donald Trump using facts or logic. You can’t. He is a literal contradiction. He’s a serial adulterer, and yet his family is shockingly, even movingly, loyal to him. He’s constantly bankrupt, and yet he’s so rich that billionaire rappers look up to him. He’s a blithering blatherskite, who will say anything to get ahead. And yet, as Dave Chappelle acknowledged, that also makes him one of the few truth-tellers in politics.