Real DeSantis launch glitch was its fascism | Will Bunch Newsletter

Memorial Day weekend brought an unusually big news event: a deal on raising the U.S. debt ceiling and related (or not) issues between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. I’m withholding any in-depth commentary because, honestly, in the hothouse of craziness known as the House Republican caucus, I’m still wondering if this thing is going to pass. Ask me how I feel next week.

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📮 Probably not unlike Cherelle Parker herself, newsletter readers seemed uncertain on what the Democrat’s One Big Thing should be if she becomes Philadelphia’s 100th mayor in 2024, as is widely expected. Thomas (no last name) wants to fire police commissioner Danielle Outlaw. That could happen. Wrote Regina Logan: “She should save Chinatown from the proposed Sixers arena. Put the thing somewhere else.” I agree, but Parker’s big-time trade-union backers seem to have other ideas.

This week’s question: Who’s the next Democrat you’d like to follow President Joe Biden as a presidential nominee, either in 2028 or (less likely) in 2024? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

Once upon a time, it was one of the most anticipated events of the 2024 presidential campaign cycle. But when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finally announced his GOP White House bid in an online audio-only venue, Twitter Spaces, last week, he must have been jealous of his host Elon Musk’s recent SpaceX rocket launch. At least that soared for roughly four minutes before it blew up.

Not that many people even logged into the Twitter chat, but if you follow politics closely, you’ve probably read about the parade of technical glitches — the minutes of dead air, followed by a feed that repeatedly cut out and crashed in real time. Very few folks were still around when DeSantis told Musk — apparently without irony — that “American decline is not inevitable — it is a choice.” Meanwhile, the Floridian’s bold idea for making a splash with his campaign announcement instead got worse reviews than the Cats movie. Twitter users mocked it as a “#DeSaster.”

The political press had a field day with the mishap, as it always does when a real-world event (think Gerald Ford stumbling onto the tarmac) seems to confirm its conventional wisdom, which is that DeSantis has already fumbled his chance to take down Republican frontrunner Donald Trump going into next year’s primaries. But as the punditocracy flipped though the thesaurus to find new ways to say “disastrous,” DeSantis kept giving interviews.

And I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know that the media missed the real story.

In one post-launch interview, the Harvard Law grad boasted to right-wing radio host Mark Levin that he had studied the “leverage points” of the U.S. Constitution and that he has a plan for expanding “the true scope” of presidential power. That sounds authoritarian and scary enough in a general way, but it’s turns out the alarming specifics were laid out in his campaign-launch book, The Courage To Be Free, that was read by fewer people than logged into Twitter Spaces last week. His blueprint for American fascism was hiding in plain sight.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the [Department of Justice] DOJ and FBI are quote, independent,” DeSantis wrote in his book. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected President of the United States.”

The notion that the Department of Justice, while run by a presidentially appointed attorney general, is in other ways independent of the president is a tradition that dates back to its founding in 1870, even if our most corrupt presidents like Trump and Richard Nixon sometimes honored that in the breach. Even in the final, coup-plotting days of the Trump presidency, top Justice Department lawyers threatened to quit and thus prevented a scheme by POTUS 45 to install a new acting AG who would push the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud.

Simply put, Trump’s efforts to politicize the Justice Department apparently weren’t fascist enough for DeSantis. When the Florida governor talks blandly about “leverage points” in the Constitution, what he’s really proposing is a level of executive control over the various levers of the federal government that is much closer to a dictatorship than anything America has experienced — the worst nightmare of the nation’s Founders. The DeSantis Way would allow a president to sic the FBI on his enemies, or demand that prosecutors exonerate his friends.

And we know that DeSantis would run the United States in this authoritarian fashion because it is exactly how the governor has ruled Florida for the last five years, turning the Sunshine State into what the author David Pepper would call a laboratory of autocracy. DeSantis has shown no hesitancy to find the “leverage points” in state law or its constitution to go after his political foes, claiming the authority to remove liberal school board members, elected officials in The Villages retirement megalopolis, or even the state’s attorney for greater Tampa. He’s also created his own state army and an election police force that brought less-than-dubious cases against some Black ballot-casters, chilling the African-American vote ahead of his 2022 reelection.

When Ron DeSantis tells you he will govern our country in a paranoid style, believe him the first time.

Currently, we are witnessing the every-four-years ritual of American political journalism. The Beltway crowd swears that it’s done this time with horse-race coverage — then chugs a mint julip and parties down the backstretch at Churchill Downs. The problem on the left currently is that people are too giddy over the DeSantis stumbles — he currently trails Trump by about 30 lengths, and is falling further behind — to care that reporters are missing the bigger picture.

Some folks get it. The great Margaret Sullivan, who now columnizes for the Guardian, ignored the Twitter mishaps to write, “Now’s the time to think about just how bad a DeSantis presidency would be.” She cited not just the high-profile horrors of DeSantis’s Florida rule — the book bans, the six-week abortion ban, the political hijacking of refugees — but the ones that don’t get enough ink. “Florida is at the bottom of state rankings for healthcare, school funding and long-term elder care,” Sullivan noted, adding that “it’s where teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the nation, as are unemployment benefits, and where efforts to raise the low minimum wage drew the governor’s active opposition.” We need more reminders of the stakes — and not in the horse-racing sense of that word.

The problem is that Trump’s huge lead isn’t a cause for celebration, but for alarm. Indeed, the 45th president seems to sort of agree with the man he calls “Meatball Ron” (or, even more bizarrely, “Rob”) that his four years in the Oval Office weren’t fascist enough. He’s promised voters that a second Trump term would be about “retribution,” that he’d be sending federal troops into crime-ridden cities and forcing the unhoused into tent cities, or jail.

It’s not a horse race, but it is a bidding war over who can promise the most dictatorial presidency to satisfy the angry social grievances of the far right. And DeSantis is out there every day upping the ante — without glitches. On Monday — Memorial Day, which honors the ultimate sacrifice by U.S. troops regardless of their ideology — he told Fox News that, given two terms, “I will destroy leftism in this country.” Voters need to listen carefully to what this dangerous candidate is actually saying. Because he’s right about one thing: American decline is not inevitable. It is, indeed, a choice.

Question: Next Philly pro team to win a title? Phillies, Eagles, Union or one of those other two that — let’s face it — never will [@ least in my lifetime] — Via Stephen | no bleu Czech (@7ForwardGears) on Twitter

Answer: Stephen, I think everyone starts by eliminating the Flyers, who’ve had more five-year plans than the old Soviet Union and yet little to show for it. The 76ers have kept hope alive with the dynamic hiring of new coach Nick Nurse, but I’m hoping we’ll have a winner before June 2024. Who? Not the Phillies, who seem to have lost their mojo when Rhys Hoskins was lost for the season. But if you have as much confidence in the Eagles as their quarterback Jalen Hurts has in himself, you gotta believe the Birds can defy the odds and return to the Super Bowl. But they may be two months too late. After a sluggish start, the Union have regained the form that took them to within 90 seconds of 2022′s MLS Cup. Look for them to bring the trophy home in December.

This Memorial Day weekend, the nation paid tribute to its war dead, including the 58,220 troops whose names are etched into the granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Just over 21,000 of those Vietnam fatalities happened after January 20, 1969 — the date that Richard Nixon became our 37th president. Could fate have invented any greater irony than the fact that Nixon’s strategist, who was arguably more responsible than anyone for the unnecessary deaths, was celebrating his 100th birthday?

If there was true justice in this world, Henry Kissinger would have been marking his centennial celebration from the Hague. Instead, a gala dinner was thrown in Kissinger’s honor at the Yale Club in Manhattan, and the Washington Post added insult to injury by publishing the former Secretary of State’s lessons on longevity, which I’m sure was well received in the living rooms from Cambodia to Chile to the American heartland where victims of Kissinger’s Machiavellian machinations didn’t live to be 25, let alone 100.

There’s definitely a generation gap here. But for folks older than 60 or so — before there was Donald Trump, before there was Dick Cheney — Henry Kissinger is the personification of pure evil. It’s impossible in this tiny newsletter section to list, let alone try, Kissinger’s many war crimes — but it’s worth noting that new ones are still coming out at age 100. Last week, The Intercept’s Nick Turse reported that survivors in 13 Cambodian villages still recalled hundreds of relatives who died violently in aerial attacks in an illegal U.S. war in which Kissinger was chief strategist. He also revealed that the massive civilian death toll was probed back in the 1970s by a secret Pentagon task force that investigated American war crimes, but did nothing.

It’s outrageous that Kissinger was never held accountable. Yet maybe what’s more galling is the way this monster of world history was treated with respect and even fawned over by people who should have known better — like the Democratic Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who became famous for a commencement speech ripping the Vietnam War while Kissinger was masterminding it, but who later embraced him. His 100th birthday “celebration” is a reminder that America will never truly find its way until our corrupt leaders are held to account for their crimes, then and now. For thousands of survivors of Henry Kissinger’s wars and illegal coups around the world, it’s small consolation that only the good die young.

“It was just four months ago that hundreds of thousands of American schoolchildren observed the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day intended to instill the message that the world can never again stand by idly and do nothing about such large-scale crimes against humanity. But the crisis in Xinjiang is showing a generation born long after the Nazi horrors of the 1930s and ‘40s that ‘Never again!’ is easier said than done.” That’s what I wrote on May 30, 2019 — expressing my outrage at China’s mistreatment of more than one million Muslim Uighurs, and the mostly indifferent response from both the United States and the wider world. Four years later, little has changed since I wrote: “Does ‘Never Again!’ mean anything if we do nothing about China’s concentration camps?”