The Media’s Anti-Trump Playbook Doesn’t Work against DeSantis

‘ Ron DeSantis Shouldn’t Be Covered Like Just Another Republican,” howls Molly Jong-Fast at Vanity Fair. “Florida’s wannabe autocrat and possible 2024 contender isn’t Trump,” she acknowledges, “but he’s as dangerous to democracy.” “Ron DeSantis is just getting started with his rightwing agenda. That should worry us all,” frets media critic Margaret Sullivan at the Guardian. “It’s appalling to see the media lavish DeSantis with so much fawning coverage,” she adds, “especially after all he has done.”

Both of these columns openly take their cues from left-wing journalism professor Jay Rosen, who attacked a column by Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman in the New York Times for analyzing DeSantis’s strategy against Donald Trump’s in “almost pure horse race” terms that covered “either strategy decisions, or the management of postures and appearances.”

These columns represent a sampling of what pours out of liberal and progressive media these days on this topic, much of which is aimed at the Times and other leading liberal outlets. Their volume and hysterical tone reveal that liberal and progressive commentators are really afraid of facing DeSantis, that they’re having a hard time de-escalating their Trump-era catastrophizing and apocalyptic rhetoric, and that they’re focused less on persuading uncommitted voters that DeSantis is bad than on keeping liberal journalists in line. Because their columns are intended to enforce discipline rather than to persuade, they do not bother presenting facts or making a coherent argument.

Here’s the thing: Hysteria aimed at the leaders of the Republican Party is a constant among Democrats and their media mouthpieces. In the last week of the 1948 campaign, Harry Truman compared Tom Dewey to Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo; the New York Times headlined its report “President likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascists’ Tool.” It opened thus: “A Republican victory on election day will bring a Fascistic threat to American freedom that is even more dangerous than the perils from communism and extreme right ‘crackpots,’ President Truman asserted here tonight.” So it has been for decades. Mitt Romney, who was as milquetoast and moderate as Dewey, was accused by Joe Biden of wanting to put black people “back in chains.” One could recite hundreds of pages of similar examples.

Given how high the bar had been set, therefore, Democrats and their advocates faced a challenge with Donald Trump. Trump in his 2016 campaign supported a bunch of conventional Republican policies as well as some harder-line stances, especially on immigration. Liberals had every right to criticize him on ideological terms. But there were also aspects of his character and conduct, apparent from the outset, that genuinely broke with the norms of behavior for American leaders. That provided liberals the opportunity and even the need to criticize Trump on nonideological terms and to point out that he was outside the norms of American politics.

Of course, Trump’s liberal critics frequently went far overboard and were often not constrained by the facts in doing so. For many of them, finding new ways to paint Trump in lurid terms as a unique threat to democratic self-rule and civil liberties became a kind of addiction; their audience craved and ate up these critiques. Still, among the various flavors of Trumpism, there were some genuinely menacing signs, none more so than Trump’s garishly displayed refusal to accept the legitimacy of his electoral defeat. That led to “stop the steal” and January 6, the political price of which Republicans are still paying.

But here we see the problem: What if Republicans nominate somebody who doesn’t share those same nonideological flaws? There is no reason to believe that DeSantis would trigger something like January 6, or that he would engage in Trump’s vicious and often pointless public tantrums and feuds. DeSantis is disciplined and methodical where Trump is chaotic and erratic. DeSantis isn’t continually trashing his own senior appointees in public or heaping praise on foreign tyrants and strongmen. He hasn’t had Trump’s crude, ugly personal life. Trump tells untruths as freely as he breathes; Ron DeSantis, being carefully prepared, is less likely to misstate facts than the typical politician. DeSantis has pushed the envelope in some of the legal stances he has taken, but, as a lawyer himself, he lacks Trump’s contempt for rules.

As a result, critics such as Jong-Fast and Sullivan are in a bind. They are trying to recreate the sorts of nonideological critiques they had deployed against Trump, but nearly all their criticism against DeSantis is ideological and aimed at his conservative actions. They are trying to hector the press into covering DeSantis as someone who is not “just another Republican,” but in terms that they routinely apply to every other Republican. Worse, by demanding that the media draw an equivalence between DeSantis and Trump, they are effectively providing aid and comfort to Trump’s campaign for another presidential nomination.

The results of this effort are hilariously implausible. Sullivan claims that DeSantis receives “fawning coverage,” and I cannot imagine how cloistered your circles must be in order to think this line will land without a laugh track. (I suppose it is an easier argument to make in the Guardian, whose audience may not closely follow the American press). Jong-Fast claims that “there’s a fair bit of evidence to suggest DeSantis is as dangerous as Trump — if not more” and that “he’s already governed the Sunshine State like a banana republic,” but then mostly complains — as does Sullivan — that DeSantis is asserting government control over government schools and government libraries.

The same people who used to mock Tea Party protesters for wanting the government to keep its hands off their Medicare are now left to argue that the government’s hands should be off government schools.

Of course, neither Jong-Fast nor Sullivan bothers to present anything like a fair or accurate presentation of the Florida education fights. Their misleading “don’t say gay” label is a pretty good sign that what they’re writing is propaganda. But that’s just further evidence of how hard it is for these writers to pretend that their grudge with DeSantis is not about their policy differences with him.

About the only example of somewhat-nonideological criticism that Jong-Fast and Sullivan levy against DeSantis is that he seeks to expand government power at the expense of civil liberties in his push to make it easier for nonpublic and semipublic figures to sue the press for libel. This would require the Supreme Court to revisit New York Times v. Sullivan, which is exactly what DeSantis argues it should do — i.e., he is seeking a change in the law through the court system. While there are fair arguments in favor of Sullivan, the case has long had scholarly originalist critics, and the country has had a free press without it from 1776 to 1964. This is a considerably less radical stance than, say, the position of many Democrats who want Citizens United overturned because they think corporations don’t have First Amendment rights — a position that would itself automatically overturn Sullivan and every other decision protecting the constitutional rights of companies that run newspapers and TV stations.

Jong-Fast and Sullivan can’t even get their theme straight. The habit of crying “authoritarian” and “threat to democracy” is so ingrained in them that they just recite these lines even when complaining about actions that would reduce government authority or make its processes more democratic. Jong-Fast complains, for example, that Trump shared the Republican donor class’s desire to cut taxes and “shrink the government and drown it in a bathtub.” This would not exactly be a means of giving the government more authority. Sullivan moans that “Florida residents may soon be able to carry firearms without a state license,” as if only authoritarians believe that citizens should be able to exercise constitutional rights without permission from the state.

If DeSantis were really the authoritarian of Democratic and of a few New Right dreams, his public rhetoric would not lean so very hard on freedom and individual liberty, resistance to the “biomedical security state,” and keeping the “Free State of Florida.” Or, at least, that rhetoric would not be so successful with the voters who have lived under his gubernatorial administration over the past five years.

The same goes for DeSantis trying to assert the power of the elected legislature and of the governor of the state over unelected government employees, or DeSantis exercising his own state constitutional powers to make appointments to the board of state universities. These are more, not less, democratic positions. And the whomping 19-point victory of DeSantis’s reelection campaign — combined with down-ticket Republican sweeps that included his endorsees to school boards — suggests that voters are apt to agree when they are given a say in how they are governed.

Jong-Fast says that DeSantis should not be treated like any other Republican, quoting a complaint about “forced pregnancy,” as if the pro-life position that has been in the Republican platform since 1976 is somehow unique to DeSantis. (In fact, Florida’s abortion law remains more liberal than those of many other red states, and even proposals to strengthen it do not go as far as those in states with complete abortion bans.) Ditto Sullivan’s complaints about Florida election and gun laws — these are conventional arguments the two parties have been having on the same terms for decades. Jong-Fast also claims that DeSantis is “the Genghis Khan of social issues, using every opportunity to target and demonize groups that have already been targeted and demonized throughout history.” But if DeSantis is really doing what Jong-Fast thinks the Right has been doing “throughout history,” then what happens to her argument that DeSantis is not like any other Republican?

In the end, whether these columns make any sense or bother to get their facts right is beside the point. They are really just trying to enforce media orthodoxy by reminding New York Times reporters and their colleagues elsewhere in the liberal press which side they’re supposed to be on.