DeSantis Exposes Trump World’s Glass Jaw

D onald 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.