Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Isn't a Trump Alternative — He's a Far-Right Bigot Too (like, omigod...Teen Vogue alert)

Teen Vogue ^ | DECEMBER 8, 2022 | LEXI MCMENAMIN

[DoodleBob]

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is certainly having a moment. In the wake of the failed “red wave” the media kept warning us about, DeSantis has been declared “the biggest winner of an otherwise dark election cycle for Republicans.” This week, Time magazine — responsible, you may recall, for the 2014 “transgender tipping point” — short-listed DeSantis for its 2022 person of the year award. This award isn’t necessarily granted to the best person in a given year: For example, past recipients include DeSantis’s current nemesis and then president-elect Donald Trump in 2016, and Adolf Hitler in 1938. But it’s another example of the media buzz around DeSantis and his possible presidential candidacy.

CNN’s recently laid-off pundit Chris Cillizza praised the timing of a potential 2024 run for DeSantis, calling him “the hottest thing going in the Republican Party” right now. Many other outlets have described DeSantis as, somehow, a substantive and possibly preferable alternative to Trump:

-From a profile in The New Yorker, June 2022: “The Florida governor channels the same rage as the former president, but with greater discipline.”

-An op-ed in Politico, July 2022: “Liberals should welcome Ron DeSantis’s rise.”

-The Tampa Bay Times, just two days after the election: “DeSantis emerges as the Trump alternative after Florida landslide.”

-An op-ed from a National Review staffer in the Washington Post, November 2022: “DeSantis would pave the way for a post-Trump GOP return to normal.”

A DeSantis presidential campaign seems all but sure to be coming. A recent poll of Utah voters found the governor in the lead among potential 2024 GOP presidential nominees, with Representative Liz Cheney and Trump trailing him in second and third place, respectively. In classic I’m-about-to-run-for-president fashion, DeSantis has a memoir coming out in February with HarperCollins. Although current Florida law (reinstated in 2018) would require DeSantis to step down from the governor’s seat to run for president, state Republicans are floating a rewrite of that policy to ease DeSantis’s road to the White House.

The normalization of this kind of far-right demagogue by the media is a dangerous mistake. DeSantis is not a more “presidential” or “respectable” version of Trump; he’s a politician who embraced Trump closely until the moment it stopped being politically useful, and who represents a grave threat to residents of Florida and the whole US. DeSantis has wrecked Florida’s policies on COVID, voting, education, protesting, immigration, reproductive rights, and more. Don’t buy the BS.

Governor DeSantis's entire political ideology can be distilled down to opposing what he refers to as "the woke left." He has used this term to categorize companies and individuals, such as the NCAA, after it refused to hold events in states like Florida that were legislating on trans youth in sports; Ben & Jerry’s for criticizing Israel; the Walt Disney Company for opposing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” policy.

And in 2021, DeSantis pushed a proposal he called the “Stop WOKE” Act, restricting education on race, which he tied to “woke ideology” or “a form of cultural Marxism.” The Stop WOKE Act was challenged in courts and DeSantis staffers were asked what “woke” actually means. The governor's general counsel, per the Washington Post, defined it as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Florida, DeSantis said in his November acceptance speech, is “where woke goes to die.”

So by these definitions, DeSantis is making his fiefdom one where, if you say there are systemic injustices in American society, you are not welcome. This doesn’t sound like a gentler alternative to Trump. In fact, this might make it harder to figure out where he and Trump (and the rest of the Republican mascots) deviate.

Even though many candidates who backed “stop the steal” lost their races, others, including DeSantis, did not. As pointed out by the Tallahassee Democrat, DeSantis has never contradicted Trump’s accusation that the 2020 election was stolen. Furthermore, he signed into law a slate of election-related legislation increasing barriers to voting that were reliant on the grand “stop the steal” lie.

Soon after coming into existence, DeSantis’s Office of Election Crimes and Security — a.k.a. his “voting police” — made 20 arrests for “illegal” voting; 15 of those arrested were Black voters. (At least one charge of voter fraud was later thrown out by a state judge.) Videos of the arrests that spread across social media showed the voters to be confused about what they had done wrong.

After initially putting COVID-19 safeguards into place, by the fall of 2020, DeSantis’s stance on the virus was that “the government, apart from protecting the elderly and making treatments available, should do almost nothing,” according to The New Yorker. Since spring 2020, more than 83,000 Floridians have died from COVID — that’s one in 258 residents. And in spite of DeSantis's comments about protecting the state’s elderly, Florida has the worst COVID death rate in the country for elders: Three-fourths of the state’s COVID deaths include the elderly.

The Palm Beach Post’s editorial board traced these outcomes back to DeSantis’s dismissive COVID policies. During the first year of the pandemic, he and his staffers cast doubt on the number of deaths, though one center at Columbia Law School said the data suggested deaths were actually undercounted. DeSantis lifted the state’s COVID business restrictions in September 2020, prior to the existence of a COVID vaccine, and ended all public health executive orders for the pandemic in May 2021.

Under DeSantis, Florida has also become more hostile to protesters. In 2020, while then President Trump fearmongered about “anarchy” overtaking Democrat-run cities, protesters fighting for racial justice were repeatedly hit by cars driven into protests — and some states, like Florida, decided to side with the drivers vs. the protesters. In spring 2021, DeSantis signed into law an “anti-riot” bill that lowers the bar for charging protesters with third-degree felonies and shields drivers who hit protesters with their vehicle from civil liability.

In April, before the fall of Roe v. Wade, DeSantis signed into law a ban on abortions starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy, without exception for rape or incest. Though DeSantis waffled on making further explicit statements on abortion in the months leading to the midterms, state Republicans won a supermajority in the Florida legislature in November, and are considering a more restrictive abortion ban starting at 12 weeks, or three months into pregnancy, potentially including an exception for rape and incest.

Inarguably, DeSantis is in part to blame for the nationwide spread of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that has targeted young people, with his very public Don’t Say Gay campaign becoming a trendsetter for conservative ideologues controlling states across the country. Attacks on the LGBTQ+ community feel ever-increasing, and this feeling is borne out in the number of bills and laws introduced or passed that affect trans youth in more than half of states.

While the DeSantis administration’s legislation and messaging emphasizes that it is focused on children (What a moral accomplishment, targeting kids! Give the governor a cookie!), it has resurfaced early 20th-century laws to justify targeting the liquor licenses of businesses that feature drag programming. If you’ve been paying attention this year, you likely know attacks on drag shows are functionally a dog whistle in the broader campaign to target LGBTQ+ people, adults included. Plus, DeSantis's focus on schools already affects adults: Think of all the LGBTQ+ teachers impacted by these policies.

DeSantis’s lack of humanity also extends to immigration policy. He and Texas governor Greg Abbott forced migrants to travel thousands of miles from their respective states to “liberal” sanctuary cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago; others were directed to the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris. The Texas Tribune reported that Florida, under DeSantis’s leadership, “flew planes to Texas, allegedly lured migrants onto the flights by promising jobs, housing and services, and a free trip to Boston, and then left those migrants in Martha’s Vineyard [about a hundred miles away].… Three of those migrants have now sued DeSantis in federal court,” alleging they were manipulated and misled. In this process, the absolute cravenness of treating human beings like cargo for transport has apparently been overlooked by DeSantis.

Maxwell Frost, Florida’s newest congressperson, cut his activist teeth pushing for gun control after the 2018 Parkland shooting, which led to the creation of March for Our Lives. For his part, DeSantis said earlier this year, he plans to remove particular gun control restrictions in the state. And this summer, the governor signed a bill appointing an armed law enforcement member for each of the state’s schools, plus he wants to address the state’s teacher shortage by recruiting retired law enforcement officers. So, like, cops in schools, in all the ways he can attempt it.

If all this wasn’t enough, DeSantis is also a hypocrite. No one was quicker to compare him to Trump than DeSantis himself, a few years ago. In a 2018 campaign ad, DeSantis “builds a wall” with one of his children and reads another (seen later in the commercial wearing a MAGA onesie) a book about Trump, with “Ron DeSantis: Pitbull Trump Defender” stated in all caps at the bottom. Given the advent of conservatives winning by flip-flopping on Trump, such as J.D. Vance, the hypocrisy here is worth identifying, even if it not surprising.

Just like Trump, DeSantis is a wealthy, pro-corporate, Ivy League-educated politician masquerading as a populist. Further empowering someone like this, especially after the chaos his governorship has wrought, would have serious consequences. But holding this against DeSantis, or holding up DeSantis as if he’s unique from Trump, as if their individual wrongdoings are what we need to stop, misses the forest for the trees. We need to reject this normalization at the root.

Media commentary that separates DeSantis from the broader conservative campaign to shred any remaining social safety net for marginalized communities in the US plays into a concept presented by the philosopher Hannah Arendt: In one of her writings about the Holocaust, which she witnessed, she coins her theory of the “banality of evil. As described by theorist Judith Butler, “If a crime against humanity had become in some sense ‘banal’ it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed.”

DeSantis’s tactics — and their movement into the mainstream — don’t exist in a vacuum; they are empowered by a media ecosystem that is all too eager to sanitize the governor's image and thereby enable him. Arendt, Butler wrote for The Guardian in 2011, “was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinized, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.” This banality — this “normal” — should never be accepted as such.

[DoodleBob]

This is the icing on top of the cake....

Lexi McMenamin (they/them) is the News & Politics Editor at Teen Vogue and a freelance writer focused on politics, identity, culture, and movements. They are the co-organizer of the Zenith Cooperative, a mentorship program for early-career journalists from marginalized backgrounds. They have reported for the BBC, VICE News, Sojourners, The Nation, The New Republic, Mic, and elsewhere. They have a masters in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism from The New School for Social Research.

I don't even know where to start.

[Jeff Chandler]

Hey Lexi, that dairy cow wants her nose ring back.

[EEGator]

I’ll start. Repeal the 19th Amendment.

[Kaiser8408a]

This is so disgusting and my wife’s loser family will repeat this like parrots. I HATE Democrats!!

[Gay State Conservative]

When I’m drunk and seeing double I’ll use “they”. At other times it’s “it” and “that”.

[Rummyfan]

Teen Vogue? TEEN VOGUE?!

[ModelBreaker]

“An op-ed from a National Review staffer in the Washington Post, November 2022: “DeSantis would pave the way for a post-Trump GOP return to normal.”

If he did that, it would be the end of the Republican party. There would be no further point in participating in elections.

[escapefromboston]

It’s no surprise that they will go after Ron just as much as they went after Trump. Republicans thinking they will go easy on him just because he’s not Trump are deluding themselves.

[HYPOCRACY]

I liked them better when they kept in their lane...

[Mark]

Go to Sweden and work on climate change!

[EEGator]

Stripes was great.

[ModelBreaker]

In reality Teen Vogue is just ahead of the curve.

DeSantis will be a great alternative for most of the media until he is nominated. Then he will immediately become Satan incarnate.

Lexi just jumped the gun.

[Allegra]

I’m hoping the subscription/circulation numbers of this trash are very low.

[jdsteel]

My comments aren’t meant to show a preference for either Trump or DeSantis. They are simply to show the predictable actions and words coming from Democrats.

Those who say DeSantis is a better choice because he doesn’t have Trump’s baggage need to understand that Democrats will immediately load all of that baggage and more on DeSantis.

For instance:

“For example, past recipients include DeSantis’s current nemesis and then president-elect Donald Trump in 2016, and Adolf Hitler in 1938. But it’s another example of the media buzz around DeSantis and his possible presidential candidacy.”

She’s purposefully linking DeSantis to both Trump and Hitler in the same sentence for the skulls full of mush that are the readers of her magazine.

[Dutch Boy]

Lenin was right wing to these people.

[Old Retired Army Guy]

Did you notice that she skipped over DeSantis’s Military Service?

[LittleBillyInfidel]

Lexi McEnema (her/icky) needs to learn from her mommy that blue eyeliner doesn’t make her eyes “more blue”.

[Paladin2]

As good as DeSantis has been, given that he doesn’t have FU money, he is likely to become a puppet/muppet of the GOPee.

[Gay State Conservative]

Yes,*whoever* the GOP nominates will become Satan’s *other* evil twin.

[Paladin2]

Coloring hair is SO unsustainable.