Democrats, Media Allies Prepare to Prop Up Trump after Midterm Drubbing

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the latest iteration of the “worse than Trump” phenomenon and hit more media misses.

‘Worse Than Trump’

Already, Democrats are preparing to employ the same strategy that helped them overperform in 2022 to prevail in 2024, and some leftist pundits are doing everything they can to help.

In the midterms, it was Republicans running in swing states and districts who tied themselves – or were able to be tied to – former president Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election who struggled the most, despite having the winds of an unpopular Democratic president and economic dissatisfaction at their backs. Naturally, Democrats want to use Trump again in 2024.

A notable exception to the rule above is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who emphasized his support for Trump during his primary race in 2018, but has since forged his own identity as a national figure – one that helped him coast to 20 point reelection victory in historically competitive Florida. His predecessor, Republican Rick Scott, won his two terms by a combined four points. 

DeSantis was already considered the chief challenger to Trump’s third straight appearance at the top of the GOP ticket, but in the aftermath of the midterms, there’s been debate over whether he’d be the frontrunner should he run in 2024; one new poll even shows him ahead of Trump by eight points. 

Of course, DeSantis’s supplanting of Trump would present a problem for Democrats. With no boogeyman to deplore, they’d have to defend their own records. Wouldn’t that be a sight to behold?

For some of the most shameless members of the press, the options before them are clear: They can either create a new boogeyman, or do what they can to ensure that the old one remains at centerstage.

Some had begun to lay the groundwork prior to last Tuesday. In a profile of DeSantis, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait asked his readers to “imagine what a Trumpified party no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would be capable of.” New York Times’ columnist Jamelle Bouie got ahead of the curve in August when he concluded that the immensely popular Florida governor was “meaner and more rigid” than Trump, who mocked Heidi Cruz’s appearance and implied that Carly Fiorina was not attractive enough to be president. But his lead has been followed by plenty of others.

Post-election, the Lincoln Project, the progressive political action committee most famous for its cover-up of sexual misconduct by one of its principles, urged its following not to be “fooled,” before insisting that “DeSantis is a more polished, but equally evil, version of Trump.”

Joe Walsh, the congressman-turned-pundit who promised to grab his “musket” if Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016, has been among the most fervent of DeSantis’s critics, arguing that the Florida governor has “ZERO charisma,” and is “weird with people,” as well as “cruel,” “driven by an authoritarian impulse,” and “super easily offended.” 

“It’s not Trump. It’s Trumpism. It’s this cruel, anti-truth, use the power of government to punish our enemies Christian nationalism that’s the problem. I mean, yea Trump’s endorsed candidates did really poorly. But DeSantis endorsed all the same candidates. So who’s the problem?” Walsh argued.

Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and Democratic National Committee chairman who lost a second bid to lead Old Dominion to Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who kept Trump at arms-length, came right out and announced his party’s preference for the GOP standard-bearer.

“I think we would all like Donald Trump to run again,” said McAuliffe before crediting Trump with having “literally helped hand us the great victories we had this week.”

For all of the media overstatement about Trump, many of the warnings about what a second Trump term could look like are realistic. If Democrats and likeminded pundits are sincere when they say Trump poses a unique threat to Democracy, they should not be cheering his nomination. Unfortunately, their short-term political and financial interests don’t necessarily align with the long-term interests of American democracy.

Democrats and their allies in the media may well survey the results of the midterms and conclude that it is in their best interest to work toward securing Trump the GOP’s nomination in 2024 – some already have. After all, boosting Doug Mastriano, Don Bolduc, and Kari Lake appears to have led to three victories for Team Blue. 

But the assertion that DeSantis is “as bad” or “worse” than Donald Trump is a damnable lie, and those making it should stop before they lose all credibility, and it backfires in a dramatic way.

Headline Fail of the Week

After DeSantis won his race against Democrat Charlie Crist by a huge margin last week, MSNBC came forward with a confusing take: “The GOP’s dominance in Florida is all about gerrymandering.”

Yet the two biggest signs that Florida is now a red state appeared in the race for governor and U.S. Senate, both of which are statewide races that are not affected by gerrymandering. 

DeSantis defeated Crist by more than 1.5 million votes, with 99 percent of the vote counted.

Incumbent Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, defeated Democratic challenger Val Demings by more than 1.2 million votes.

Media Misses

• One cheer for the New York Times for publishing an article on the risks associated with administering puberty blockers to children suffering from gender dysphoria. “There is emerging evidence of potential harm from using blockers, according to reviews of scientific papers and interviews with more than 50 doctors and academic experts around the world,” write Megan Twohey and Christina Jewett. 

Institutionally, the Times is late to taking this serious issue seriously, and even this newest piece hedges and charges Republicans with “politicizing” the issue. But still: This is progress.

• The Times’s Peter Baker penned a pre-midterms profile of President Biden in which he writes that “faith has been Mr. Biden’s calling card in his nearly two years in office — faith in the system in which he has been a fixture for more than half a century, faith that he could repair the fissures of a broken society, faith that he and he alone could beat former President Donald J. Trump if they face off again in 2024,” and laments that others have not allowed him to heal the country like Jesus did the lepers.

Lost on Baker is Biden’s own role in dividing the country by likening his political opponents to George Wallace and Jefferson Davis and administering a system Biden deemed “Jim Crow on steroids.”

• MSNBC’s Katy Tur suggested that Pennsylvania Senator-elect John Fetterman might have a presidential future – a frightening prospect for those of us who watched the debate between Fetterman and Dr. Mehmet Oz.