By Noah
Rothman
Tuesday,
March 21, 2023
Donald
Trump “is a manly man.” At least, that’s what Claremont Institute
chairman Tom
Klingenstein believes.
The former president embodies “traditional manhood,” which, “even when flawed,
is absolutely essential,” Klingenstein says. We can speculate about the
masculine features Klingenstein admires in Trump, but one of those should be
the capacity to absorb even glancing blows in the fights “manly men” pick for
themselves. And on the evidence of their ongoing feud with Governor Ron
DeSantis, the sort of stolidity we expect of the strong-willed is lacking in
both Trump and his courtiers.
For
months, Trump and his entourage tried to goad DeSantis into a political brawl.
Their solicitations were not subtle.
In late
January, Trump attacked DeSantis’s efforts to
“rewrite history” on their respective approaches to the Covid pandemic, with
the former president insisting that “Ron DeSanctimonious” had fared “FAR WORSE
than many other Republican governors” at handling the virus. Trump retailed a variety of puerile nicknames
he might deploy against his most potent rival — from “RINO Globalist” Ron to “Meatball
Ron” to the evocative,
straightforward “Tiny
‘D.’” And he tried with little success to ignite controversy around a
picture of
DeSantis surrounded by high-school girls by implying that the governor was a
closet ephebophile.
It was
all part of what Axios called Trump’s “5-part plan” to destroy DeSantis’s presidential
hopes. The multipronged assault involved appropriating the attacks that
Democrats use against fiscally conservative Republicans while indicting the
governor for his apparent disloyalty to Trump’s personality cult. The former
president’s allies even went so far as to accuse the
governor of
criminal violations of state campaign-finance laws.
Through
it all, DeSantis refused to take the bait.
When
asked by reporters for a response to the notion that he was a scofflaw
revisionist historian with deviant sexual appetites, DeSantis declined to
dignify the allegations. “I spend my time delivering results for the people of
Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” he replied. “I don’t spend my time trying to
smear other Republicans.” If nothing else, this showed message discipline. But
it didn’t satisfy DeSantis’s MAGA critics, and they continued to needle him.
This
weekend, Trump announced on his social-media platform that he expected to be
indicted by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, which prompted Trump’s allies
to put an ultimatum to DeSantis: Unless he went on record with his distaste for this nakedly political
prosecution, they threatened, his “silence” would serve as an indication of his
complacency. At long last, DeSantis responded.
“Look, I
don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence
over some type of alleged affair,” the governor began. “I just, I can’t speak
to that.” He criticized Bragg for “weaponizing” his office over something as
petty as Trump’s “porn-star hush-money payments.”
DeSantis’s
comments were wisely understated. He did exactly what his obsessive MAGA
critics asked of him while implicating Trump in a sordid act of moral vacuity.
Here, for the first time, DeSantis gave as good as he got. And with that, Trump
and his allies melted down like a graphite-moderated reactor.
The
pro-Trump PAC Make America Great Again Inc. marveled over DeSantis’s dismissal of
Trump’s ordeal, in which he said that he preferred to focus on “issues that
actually matter” to Floridians. “Woooooow,” wrote Raheem Kassam, editor of the National
Pulse, in a theatrical reaction to DeSantis’s “tone-deaf response.”
“Ron DeSantis declares the far left takeover of the judiciary, leading to the
potential arrest of a former president, not a ‘real issue.’”
Human
Events senior
editor Jack Posobiec scoffed at DeSantis’s
characterization of the affair as a “manufactured circus” orchestrated by
Bragg, which is not all that different from how Trump’s allies characterize
Bragg’s conduct. Claremont Institute Publius Fellow Paul Ingrassia likened DeSantis’s rejection
of Trump to the way “Lucifer rebelled against God,” and said it would condemn
him to a similarly “Luciferian” fate.
“Gov.
DeSantis, you’re better than this,” a visibly betrayed Steve Bannon
mourned. “That was
a weasel approach. Don’t throw in the thing about the porn star. I don’t need
to hear it from you, okay?” My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell agreed. “DeSantis is the
Trojan Horse we thought he was,” Lindell protested. “I just want to put that
out there, how disgusting he is.” “Evil is greedy,” Lindell added, presumably
in reference to DeSantis, “and this will backfire on him just like everything
else does.”
Trump
himself took the opportunity to reprise his veiled accusation that DeSantis is
a pervert. “Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS
& FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better
known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by women, even classmates that
are ‘underage,’” Trump wrote, before adding, with a signature
flourish, “(or possibly a man!)” In defaming DeSantis, Trump also amplified the
claim posited by the Democratic super PAC Meidas Touch that “DeSantis partied with
underage girls at a drinking party.”
If
Trump’s boosters genuinely believe that his moral lapses and character flaws do
not represent a liability in their efforts to win over Republican primary
voters, they’re not acting like it. Nor, for that matter, is DeSantis.
The
fragility DeSantis’s artful needling exposed puts the lie to the notion that
Trump and the delicate egos with whom he is surrounded can take the kind of
heat that they routinely dish out. For all who are willing to see it, this
display of brittleness reveals how false the MAGA right’s bravado truly is. And
DeSantis isn’t even in the game yet. If this is how Trump and his acolytes
respond to a glancing blow, just imagine how they’ll respond when the Florida
governor starts throwing real punches.
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