On the menu today: In the last few days, Ron DeSantis has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who will “do better” than Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett and pledged to change the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg. He has not, however, offered even a syllable of criticism of the way Donald Trump kept classified information at Mar-a-Lago. Your mileage may vary, but that strikes me as a strange selection of battles to fight and not fight — a selection that seems even odder in light of Nikki Haley’s willingness to hit Trump on the handling of classified documents. Is this what happens when a challenger like DeSantis decides he can only attack Trump from the right, and believes that Trump’s erratic decision-making and general lunacy are off-limits?
Which Battles Does Ron DeSantis Want to Fight?
I realize it is extremely difficult to run a winning campaign against a cult of personality that encompasses, at minimum, a large plurality of the current makeup of the Republican Party. Ron DeSantis can run his campaign, and make his argument against the renomination of Donald Trump, any way he likes. But he’s picking some strange battles lately.
DeSantis, appearing on The Hugh Hewitt Show Monday morning, said:
Hewitt: Now in terms of the judges that you will bring to bear on this, former President Trump hit three home runs with his Supreme Court appointments. Are you going to make the same kind of pledge to the Republicans as you go around the country that your judges will be like the Trump judges?
DeSantis: Well, actually, I would say we’ll do better than that. I mean, I respect the three appointees he did, but none of those three are at the same level of Justices Thomas and Justice Alito. I think they are the gold standard, and so my justices will be along the lines of a Sam Alito and a Clarence Thomas. And in Florida, I inherited a very liberal state supreme court, maybe the most liberal in the country, very activist. But I was able to replace three of the four liberals my first month in office with conservative justices. I’ve since been able to make a number of appointments since then. So we now have the most conservative state supreme court in the country. And so I think we have a really good track record on doing that. And in fact, two of my supreme court picks in my first year of office were elevated to the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump.
I doubt that Republican primary voters will warmly and enthusiastically embrace the argument that Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett represent some sort of disappointment, and that the next Republican president needs to “do better” than those three.
Can you point to decisions Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett have made that disappointed or frustrated Republicans? Sure. Kavanaugh ruled with Roberts and the Court’s three liberals on the recent redistricting case. Gorsuch sided with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Title 42 immigration decision. In 2021, Barrett did not join an Alito and Gorsuch dissent in an Obamacare-related case and staked out a middle-ground position in a foster-care case.
At the risk of an oversimplification, all three justices have libertarian streaks or an overall skepticism of state power that does not always align with the interests of the Republican Party on every single issue.
It’s not reasonable to expect a justice to rule the way you want every single time. Every year, the Court issues about 100 to 150 decisions. That means a justice who agrees with you 90 percent of the time is going to issue ten to 15 decisions that disappoint you. Even the people whom you admire most are human beings and will let you down at least once in a great while. (Michael Jordan, by his own account, missed 26 game-winning shots in his career.)
As I noted yesterday, the same presidents who nominated Justices Thomas and Alito — George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, respectively — also appointed Justice David Souter (indisputably not whom Republicans wanted) and Chief Justice John Roberts (not as liberal as his reputation suggests, but perceived as a turncoat because of his decisions in some of the most high-profile cases).
Trump’s choices for the Supreme Court are, among conservatives, probably the least vulnerable part of his record as president. If you want to argue that the Federalist Society effectively chose them and that Trump merely acquiesced to its suggestions, fine, but that just means that on these particular decisions, Trump knew the correct people to listen to before making the choice.
Are comments such as those made by DeSantis to Hewitt what happens when the Florida governor decides he can only attack Trump from the right, and believes that Trump’s erratic decision-making and general lunacy are off-limits?
There’s also something odd about the decision by DeSantis — and Mike Pence, for that matter — to pledge to re-rename the former Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, back to Fort Bragg. Speaking at the North Carolina Republican convention recently, DeSantis said, “It’s an iconic name and an iconic base, and we’re not going to let political correctness run amok in North Carolina.”
The renaming of Fort Bragg was part of a mandate in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which passed the House 322–87, passed the Senate 81–13, and was signed into law by President Trump. (Trump had initially vetoed the NDAA, and then the legislation subsequently passed with a veto-proof majority, so Trump signed it into law the second time.) At the beginning of this year, the Pentagon’s Renaming Commission made nine recommendations to change the names of nine facilities named after men who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America. The forts’ new names will honor figures such as:
- “General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, the leader of the liberation of Europe in World War II, and the 34th president of the United States.”
- “Army Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and his wife, Julia Compton Moore. Moore commanded U.S. forces in the first large-scale battle of the Vietnam War.”
- “Dr. Mary Edwards Walker — the first woman surgeon in the Civil War, and the only woman awarded the Medal of Honor.”
- “Army Gen. Richard E. Cavazos, a Hispanic-American hero of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars.”
Is a President DeSantis really going to expend some of his limited political capital in 2025 or 2026 in a fight with Congress to take down signs that say “Fort Liberty” and put back the signs that say “Fort Bragg”? Does DeSantis really want to go to the mattresses for Braxton Bragg, “the most hated man of the Confederacy,” who, it turns out, was a pretty lousy general?
Finally, DeSantis’s tweet after news about the indictment of Trump criticized the Department of Justice, but not the frontrunner:
The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.
At the North Carolina GOP convention, DeSantis struck a similar tone:
Our founding fathers would have absolutely predicted the weaponization that we’ve seen with these agents, particularly Justice and FBI, because when you don’t have constitutional accountability, human nature is such that they will abuse power. And that’s what happened.
If DeSantis saw anything to criticize in Trump’s actions regarding the classified information stored at Mar-a-Lago, he’s keeping it to himself.
By contrast, notice this about-face on the part of Nikki Haley:
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley used some of her sharpest words for Donald Trump to date on Monday, asserting that if the behavior alleged in the most recent indictment is true, “President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security.”
Appearing Monday on Fox News, Haley notably shifted her position regarding special counsel Jack Smith’s classified-documents probe and the charges that have followed, which include willful retention of national-defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements. While Haley has previously hit Trump on other issues, such as his decision to congratulate Kim Jong Un, she hasn’t gone after him on his legal troubles to this extent.
Before the indictment was unsealed, Haley wrote on Twitter that “the American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics.”
For much of this campaign, Haley’s criticisms of Trump have been particularly careful and finessed. It’s not that she’s never been willing to criticize Trump. It’s just that we’ve seen Haley when she really wants to hit a rival — as a Southern woman, she’s never been afraid to bless a heart, either in domestic politics or at the United Nations — and based on her past tough attacks, she’s indisputably pulled her punches against Trump so far.
At the Club for Growth retreat, she lamented, “The last two Republican presidents added more than $10 trillion to the national debt. Think about that. A third of our debt happened under just two Republicans.” (Of course, that lumps in one-term Trump ($6.7 trillion) with two-term Bush ($5.8 trillion).) She proposed a competency test for any politician over the age of 75 — Trump turns 77 tomorrow — but doesn’t want any consequences for failing that test beyond the publication of the results.
But Haley’s current criticism of Trump is different, and the former South Carolina governor makes clear that this latest classified-information scandal hits home for her:
I’m a military spouse. My husband is about to deploy this weekend. This puts all of our military men and women in danger if you are going to talk about what our military is capable of or how we go about invading or doing something with one of our enemies.
Michael Haley, a major in the South Carolina Army National Guard, is preparing to deploy to Africa as part of a task force that supports U.S. Africa Command. The tour is expected to last a year, meaning the Haley’s husband will be away for almost the entire GOP primary. Among other missions, U.S. Africa Command is currently conducting operations against al-Shabaab fighters, at the request of the Federal Government of Somalia. Al-Shabaab is an Islamist insurgent group whose senior leaders remain affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Nikki Haley is willing to say the indictment spells out unforgivably reckless behavior. Why can’t DeSantis say the same? Why won’t DeSantis say the same?
Nobody who currently supports Donald Trump is going to change their vote to Ron DeSantis because DeSantis proved to be such an effective defender of Trump.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, the Times of London offers a good, comprehensive, and detailed review of what is known about the origin of Covid-19, and the extensive evidence pointing to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting gain-of-function research on genetically similar viruses.