[ Donald Trump was and is a lazy, ignorant narcissist. The Florida
governor is a smart, motivated, very right-wing Catholic who wants to
remake America as he imagines God wants it to be. Is this what the
MAGA controlled GOP has come to?]
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BELIEVE IT: A DESANTIS PRESIDENCY COULD BE EVEN WORSE THAN TRUMP  
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Brynn Tannehill
February 8, 2023
The New Republic
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_ Donald Trump was and is a lazy, ignorant narcissist. The Florida
governor is a smart, motivated, very right-wing Catholic who wants to
remake America as he imagines God wants it to be. Is this what the
MAGA controlled GOP has come to? _

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, both
contenders for 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Who else?,
image: Katie Couric Media 2022

 

Many Republicans who were put off by Donald Trump’s peccadillos,
ignorance, and outlandish behavior have found their anointed one
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis offers Trumpism without Trump,
promises to Make America Great Again without saying the words, and
wallows in the culture-war cruelties that propelled Trump into office
in 2016. The betting markets
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have DeSantis and former President Trump in a dead heat for the
Republican presidential nominee in 2024.

There’s little appetite
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either Democrats or Republicans for a Biden v. Trump rematch. Recent
polling suggests that Biden loses
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a match against DeSantis, even if a third-party candidate (like Trump)
is in the race. Given this, and given how DeSantis seems relatively
sane and intelligent compared to Trump, the public seems to assume
that DeSantis would be a better president than Trump.

This is a horrible mistake.

DeSantis differs from Trump in several ways. While Trump couldn’t
care less about “critical race theory” or transgender people, and
simply throws stuff into speeches at his rallies that get the biggest
reaction, DeSantis is a deeply conservative Catholic and a true
believer in the culture wars he engages in. The other key difference
is that DeSantis is a Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyer, while Trump
skated through a bachelor’s in business where one of his
professors called him
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dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”

DeSantis fully intends to remake America the way he believes God would
want it to be, and his knowledge of law and governmental structure
allows him to do it on a scale, and with a precision, that Trump could
only dream about.

The damage Trump was able to do was limited by his lack of discipline,
ignorance of how the system worked, laziness, and lack of motivation.
He is simply a narcissist who likes feeling rich, powerful, and
important. DeSantis, however, is none of these things. He is not lazy.
He has discipline, motivation, and an intimate knowledge of how to use
the system to get what he wants. DeSantis fully intends to remake
America the way he believes God would want it to be, and his knowledge
of law and governmental structure allows him to do it on a scale, and
with a precision, that Trump could only dream about.

We can already see the sorts of strategies DeSantis would employ as
president by looking at what he’s done in his role as governor of
Florida. DeSantis pursues legislation that he intentionally frames as
moderate or commonsense, such as “only” banning abortion after 15
weeks (but without exceptions for rape or incest). His “don’t say
gay” law was framed as being about not teaching K–3 students about
obscene material.

In reality, DeSantis is pursuing one of the most aggressively
authoritarian agendas in the country. He uses two primary strategies:
capturing the referees and strategic ambiguity.

Two of the best examples of capturing the referees are how DeSantis
quietly packed both the Florida Board of Medicine and the New College
Board of Trustees with ideological fellow travelers to bend
institutions to their will. The Board of Medicine now includes
campaign donors, Catholics who substitute the Vatican’s positions
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that of professional medical organizations, and proponents
of conversion therapy, while the surgeon general of Florida
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an anti-vaxxer. As a result, the Florida Board of Medicine is in the
process of banning transition-related health care for children and
making it much more difficult for adults to obtain. DeSantis moved the
decision-making process out of the public spotlight and handed
decision-making authority to people who can never be held accountable
at the ballot box.

At the New College, DeSantis appointees (who included people with no
connections to Florida and ideologues like Christopher Rufo) wasted no
time in sacking
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president of the institution. Their mandate is to take a liberal arts
college and turn it into the “Hillsdale of the South,” a nod to
the right-wing Christian school in Michigan that has produced a
generation of conservative theologians and lawyers.

This is all in line with DeSantis’s bans on CRT and diversity,
equity, and inclusion programs as well as his vow to eliminate “woke
ideology” from Florida schools. He has stepped directly into the
fray with his ban on A.P. African American Studies. In some ways this
resembles how Viktor Orbán of Hungary has channeled state funds into
building a university system that serves as a propaganda machine
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his autocratic administration. In DeSantis’s case, he has promised
to require students to take only GOP-approved courses that teach
“actual history and actual philosophy that have shaped Western
civilization.” He is also launching an assault on tenure to
(presumably) force out professors who cross conservative ideology.

The other central piece of DeSantis’s strategy to destroy
institutions is the use of strategic ambiguity to induce these
institutions to over-police themselves. The DeSantis administration
swore up and down that the “Florida Parental Rights in Education
Act” (the “don’t say gay” law) was simply there to protect
vulnerable young children from being exposed to dangerous or obscene
ideas, images, or writing. In reality, it was deliberately vague and
overly broad. When schoolteachers and librarians reached out for
guidance on what is allowed, they were met with silence by the
DeSantis administration. This left them with the choice: Do we remove
everything from school libraries, or do we risk the potential legal
consequences of annoying his administration?

They chose to remove
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the books. DeSantis has a history of making an example of institutions
that cross him on culture-war issues, whether it is the Disney
Corporation
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the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra
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An analogy to the DeSantis strategy is a bully who commands his victim
to punch themself in the face. “How hard?” they ask. DeSantis’s
response is effectively, “If I don’t think you’re hitting
yourself hard enough, I’ll hit you harder.” All he has to do after
that is watch the people he’s tormenting smash their own faces
repeatedly to avoid what they imagine to be coming if they don’t.
This potentially inflicts worse damage than if they had just said
“no.”

Applying all of this to a DeSantis presidency paints an ugly picture.
Imagine a Food and Drug Administration packed with DeSantis appointees
who ban abortifacients, birth control, and the use of hormones to
treat transgender people. This bypasses the courts and probably stands
up to legal challenge in a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court. The FDA
could also ban the use of specific drugs for use in surgical
abortions, resulting in what amounts to a 50-state ban.

People also forget that commissioned officers of the U.S. military
serve at the pleasure of the president. A DeSantis administration,
waging war on “wokeness,” would sack any flag officer it suspects
of ideological impurity. It’s not hard to foresee a return of
“don’t ask, don’t tell,” or the institution of a physical
fitness test rigged to force a large number of women out of the
military.

This isn’t idle speculation either: Regardless of whether Trump or
DeSantis wins in 2024, the GOP plans on bringing back Trump’s
“Schedule F
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play to replace most senior policymakers in civil service with
political employees who will go about implementing a complete
reshaping of American based on a Christian Nationalist ideology. There
are already lists of those to be fired
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to Axios, and the GOP is actively vetting and lining up people to
replace them should the opportunity present itself.

The strategic ambiguity piece of this comes into play as well. These
policymakers can issue overly broad and vague mandates and then use
the power of the executive branch to bully states into submission.
Potentially “bad” books in California schools? They’ll threaten
to block money from the Department of Education. (Trump did this to
Connecticut
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transgender student athletes.) Or blocking Medicare and Medicaid
funding to states that don’t go along with the demands of Department
of Health and Human Services, the FDA, and the DeSantis surgeon
general, regardless of whether these demands have any basis in
science. Or maybe leveraging the attorney general to threaten federal
charges against state officials who refuse to comply, the way he
did with officials who refused
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enforce his new anti-abortion laws.

In the end, most states would go along with such demands. Losing these
funding streams would cripple state economies, and state officials are
loath to risk themselves over ideological fights. This suggests that
should DeSantis become president, we’re likely to see the rest of
the country voluntarily becoming indistinguishable, policy-wise, from
deep-red Southern states.

This is the way a free and modern society ends: not with a bang, but a
whimper.

_[BRYNN TANNEHILL is a Naval Academy graduate, former naval aviator,
author, and senior defense analyst. She currently lives in Northern
Virginia with her wife and three children.  @BrynnTannehill
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* Ron DeSantis
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* Donald Trump
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* Republican Party
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* MAGA
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* GOP
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* 2024 Elections
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* Fascism
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* Right-wing agenda
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* assault on democracy
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* Florida
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* religion
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* Religion and Politics
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* Christianity
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* Catholicism
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