NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A ren’t you a bit bored of politics? I can barely drag my eyes over the names Biden, Trump, and DeSantis by now. And the damn contest hasn’t even started. Have you tried reading about any of the news about those guys from, say, the Washington Post? How do you do it without becoming the type of person who thieves mood-altering drugs? Maybe that eight ball of cocaine was in the White House because without it the staffers would just fall asleep out of sheer boredom.
The only thing that kept me mildly interested was RFK Jr., because he would sometimes say true things that I don’t expect Democratic politicians to say. This week it was his speaking out against censorship to Congress and saying, “We have to elevate the Constitution, which was written for hard times.” You hear that line out of his halting voice, and it just doesn’t sound like the Democratic Party register anymore. It’s two whole clauses without a mention of white supremacy. RFK Jr. says false things too. The problem is I’m not status-blind when it comes to crazy — I treat crazy ideas according to their danger, not their class pedigree. I have a hard time getting worked up over RFK’s low-status views about drug companies. Nothing he says strikes me as being as dangerous as the high-status belief that young boys and girls can switch genders, which all his Democratic antagonists feel obliged not only to believe but to lavishly fund.
But even if you’re scanning for Kennedy’s name in the news, it’s surrounded by adenoidal scolding, telling you that you have to believe that the same companies profiting from selling confused minors puberty-blockers are heroic enterprises that would never lie to you about anything serious.
Anyway, the Republican candidates can’t even generate news unless they’re standing near Tucker Carlson. Then the news media want to debate what Tucker said, which tells you that this isn’t really a race, not yet.
We’ve gotten some long policy statements from a few of them. Here’s a link to Trump on education, and here’s Ron DeSantis on a mission-ready military.
Donald Trump’s success in 2016 was based partly on his personality and partly on his easy-to-understand policy ideas, which led him to say things like, “The wall just got ten feet higher.” The way it worked is that he had a policy that appealed to Republican voters, and he put it in memorable terms that so offended Democratic sensibilities, the media just kept repeating what Trump said, incredulously, until every Republican voter was sold.
DeSantis got to his prominent position by refusing to join the rest of the American political class in forcing your kids to wear masks that didn’t work for them, or to threaten your livelihood over whether you took a vaccine that you may not have needed or wanted or trusted. I know that seems like a very low bar in retrospect. But at a time when American society was so wound up, it actually took guts. People loved it.
Anyway, the whole political world is built around the idea that DeSantis is going to fight Trump for the nomination at some point. And I’m here to tell you that nothing will develop on this front until the two of them are on a stage together.
Why? Because DeSantis is smart.
What do you mean? Don’t Republicans want an alternative to Trump? Doesn’t that mean criticizing him? It does.
So . . . ? The trick is that this fight has to happen inside the Republican tent. If DeSantis does what Chris Christie does — goes on Sunday-morning talk shows and bashes Trump — he’ll look like he’s amplifying liberal criticisms of Trump, which most partisans don’t distinguish from criticisms of themselves.
Scores of millions of Republican voters know what Donald Trump is like — including all the downsides. But they don’t want to see Ron DeSantis trying to spike the volleyball on Trump’s head if it’s Jake Tapper, Mika Brzezinski, or Fareed Zakaria setting him up to do so.
Nothing is going to matter until DeSantis can speak directly to Trump’s face and own the consequences of it.
Until then, enjoy your summer.