American Politics Reaches Its ‘Worse Than Trump’ Phase

D elivering into the political ether a line that had hitherto been reserved to satirists, MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah proposed on Tuesday that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump.” “Former President Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to our nation, at least, if you support our democratic republic,” Obeidallah wrote. “But DeSantis is more dangerous.”

That was quick.

The proximate cause of Dean Obeidallah’s ire is that Ron DeSantis isn’t setting the same masking rules for children as Dean Obeidallah would if Dean Obeidallah were the governor of Florida. Given that the CDC lists a national child-hospitalization rate of 0.5 per million — which, as the Wall Street Journal notes, “would amount to roughly 25 patients,” not all of whom are even “in the hospital for Covid” — I strongly disagree with Obeidallah’s assessment. But I’m aware that the details aren’t really the point here: This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler. The assertion that “DeSantis is worse than Trump” was inevitable from the moment Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

One of the main reasons it proved so difficult to convince primary voters that Trump was bad news in 2015 was that those voters had been told the same scary things about almost every Republican candidate since Eisenhower. Barry Goldwater was an extremist who was going to kill us all. Ronald Reagan was an extremist who was going to kill us all. So was George W. Bush. So were John McCain and Mitt Romney. So, even, were the host of primary opponents Trump faced in 2015 — many of whom were cast by mainstream writers such as Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, Eugene Robinson, and Paul Krugman as being less desirable candidates than Trump himself. As it turned out, many of the criticisms that the American Left leveled against Trump were correct. In the vast majority of cases, however, that’s not why they were leveled; they were leveled because they’re always leveled, irrespective of the justification for leveling them.

This being so, it should not be a great surprise that progressives are busy trying to cast DeSantis as “Trump 2.0” — nor, indeed, that they hope to cast anyone who has ever interacted with the 45th president as a troglodyte insurrectionist. But there is no reason for the rest of us to fall for it.

In reality, Ron DeSantis has very little in common with Donald J. Trump. It is true that, while running for governor, DeSantis tried hard to win Trump’s endorsement, and that, in pursuit of that goal, he produced a bunch of obsequious political ads for which he fully deserved to be mocked. Beyond that, though, the two men could scarcely be less alike if they tried. Ron DeSantis is a lifelong conservative who is not only fluent in policy as a general matter, but who was correctly described by Bill Maher this year as being “a voracious consumer of the scientific literature.” He has both legislative and gubernatorial experience, having served in Congress before winning election to the governor’s mansion. He attended both Yale and Harvard Law School; he served in Fallujah, Iraq, as a JAG attached to Seal Team One. Back in 2001, he even spent a year teaching high-school history. Both in Congress and as governor, DeSantis has taken many positions that American progressives dislike on the merits, but he has always remained within the mainstream on fundamental matters such as respect for the rule of law and the importance of American norms. In 2018, when DeSantis clinched the Republican nomination for governor, he made a point of resigning from Congress to campaign because he thought it would be “inappropriate for me to accept a salary” if he wasn’t doing his job — a move that echoed his decision five years earlier to decline his congressional pension and health-insurance plans on the grounds that they were unacceptable perks. If you can read these elementary facts and still say, “Yeah, the guy’s just like Trump,” then you lack a firm grasp on reality.

In a two-party system such as ours, there will always be overlap between candidates — sometimes even in cases where those candidates are nothing alike. That Ron DeSantis does not spend his time criticizing Donald Trump teaches us nothing more about Ron DeSantis than Ronald Reagan’s refusal to spend the post-Watergate era criticizing Richard Nixon taught us about Ronald Reagan. On the face of it, it is utterly absurd for Dean Obeidallah to propose that Governor DeSantis’s well-considered COVID-19 policies (policies that have allowed the third-most-populous state in the union to remain 26th in the nation in COVID deaths, and 42nd in the nation in senior-citizen COVID deaths) render DeSantis “more dangerous” than the man whom Obeidallah has accused of staging “an attempted coup.” But, to amend a phrase slightly, the absurdity is the point. What Obeidallah is doing here is not analysis or argument, so much as it is a signal that the focus of American politics has shifted, and that it’s time at long last for a swapping out of the villains.