Jonathan Chait is nothing if not a consistent barometer and leading public indicator of which Republican partisan Democrats fear the most. In 2016, it wasn’t Trump, which is why he wrote a now-infamous column on the eve of the New Hampshire primary — at the very point when both a Trump nomination and a Trump loss to Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio seemed possible — entitled “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination.” In 2021, he was pushing back against anyone who wanted Republicans to move on from Trump. In recent months, he has been refocusing to attack Ron DeSantis, making the inevitable and much-predicted turn to arguing that DeSantis is worse than Trump. Chait even dedicated the launch of his newsletter to this theme.
His latest profile is full of now-familiar Chait hobbyhorses, but the most unintentionally funny part is the (to him) ominous opening, describing a DeSantis press conference in February, which he illustrates with a photo array:
As DeSantis spoke, he looked like a man who had been mimicking Donald Trump’s speeches in front of the mirror. He performed a series of hand thrusts, in which he drew his thumbs together until they were almost touching, then jerked them apart in quick horizontal motions, as if he were playing an invisible accordion. After five such accordion pulls, he swung his right hand, thumb pointing up, in a semi-circular motion back inward to the center. DeSantis tweeted out the clip, and any MAGA fan watching, even without the sound on, would have grasped the gist just through the eerie physical impersonation.
I would submit to the reader that Donald Trump did not actually invent Italian-Americans talking with their hands. A writer for New York should know that.