Not least among the reasons I hope Ron DeSantis is the next Republican nominee for president is this one: The nation deserves a clear, honest reckoning with how we faced up to the Covid crisis, unclouded with any distractions such as the personality defects of Donald Trump. DeSantis is the one potential candidate who can vigorously represent what has become the conservative position: that non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks were generally useless in stopping the spread of a highly contagious airborne disease, and even if they did have some small benefit, it was certainly not worth the immense psychological and developmental cost imposed cruelly and mindlessly on the children of this country. Florida children went back to school unmasked in August of 2020 and got on with their lives. I wish I could say the same of New York children, who have been beaten into submission and in many cases are still wearing masks, though they are no longer mandated.
Karol Markowicz, who was driven out of New York City and moved to Florida with her family when she decided her three children could not absorb any more punishment from the state in the name of “protecting” them, has a strong column up along these lines at RealClearPolitics. As Karol notes, the Democratic Party-aligned media is furiously trying to argue that DeSantis is “just like Trump” or “much worse than Trump.” I do not think that the voters will swallow this argument, as they have eyes and ears. DeSantis’s ability to calmly and convincingly explain his positions in complete sentences instead of word bursts is a refreshing change from Trump’s style, as is his ability to correct Democratic Party toadies posing as nonpartisan reporters without getting distracted by various feuds, grievances, and lies about who won the last election.
DeSantis is like Trump in that he utterly rejects false media narratives. He is simply much more effective at this than Trump. So he poses a colossal threat to the media’s ability to dictate terms of the conversation, and if he seems to have a shot at the White House, they will come after him at least as hard as they went after Trump.