The folks DeSantis crushed on his road to nowhere | Will Bunch Newsletter

If you see a new car parked in the “Senior Citizens Only” spot at your local supermarket, it might be me! When I was a little kid, I imagined that my 65th birthday might be spent planning my retirement party — or enjoying a ride in my flying car. Instead, I finished a column and watched a football team I was rooting for lose. Old age feels exactly the same, so far.

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This winter I mark 40 years of covering presidential campaigns, and I’ve seen all kinds of weird stuff, from that first day in 1984 — forced to watch also-ran California Sen. Alan Cranston jog around a Birmingham track to prove he wasn’t too old to be POTUS (he was 69) — to hanging out with Donald Trump supporters on the Wildwood boardwalk in 2020. But now I can authoritatively state I’ve seen the worst run for the White House of my lifetime.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — long a bête noire of this column for his neo-fascist policies in the Sunshine State, but ignored lately as his national campaign was clearly crashing and burning — stated the obvious on Sunday when he suspended his presidential bid. Pundits were quick to note that DeSantis — who’d raised in the ballpark of $150 million from his rich pals and spent almost all of it, with a lot on perks like private jet travel — received just 23,420 caucus votes in Iowa before his withdrawal, giving him the record for the worst dollar-per-vote ratio of all time.

Any notion that you don’t kick a man when he’s down felt wrong for DeSantis, who has practically changed Florida’s state motto to “The Cruelty Is The Point” during his five years as governor. For those on the left who truly despised the failed candidate, Sunday was a day for schadenfreude and a ton of jokes. One poster on Twitter/X said the governor who signed an after-six-weeks abortion ban in his home state should have been forced to carry his campaign to full term. In a fitting coda, the dramatic keep-fighting quote DeSantis tweeted and attributed to Winston Churchill turned out to be from a 1938 Budweiser ad.

I’m totally here for the DeSantis jokes, and I hope they don’t stop coming. But I also feel compelled to point out that the way that this small man in search of a balcony conducted himself these last couple of years is really no laughing matter. In the end, DeSantis’ presidential aspirations clung to two things: How much money he could raise from the wealthy, and how many points he could score by dunking on the dreams of the poor, the young, the different, or the struggling.

The modern political innovation of DeSantis — if it can be called that — was taking the kind of blustery rally-stage bravado that characterizes Trump and using his GOP majority in Tallahassee to turn that into all-too-real laws or initiatives. The New York Times Opinion writer Jane Coaston said it best on X/Twitter Sunday when she wrote that “DeSantis’ campaign was like ‘we’re the most online people alive and we’re going to performatively use the state to hurt people you don’t like, just tell me the group and I’ll go hurt them.’”

There are so many examples of folks whose lives have been turned upside down by DeSantis, including a lot of people who decided to leave the state as a new breed of political refugee. I think about Ronald Miller, a 58-year-old Black man who was rousted in his underwear, at gunpoint, by Miami-Dade cops who handcuffed and arrested him as part of a DeSantis “voter fraud” crackdown that mainly netted ineligible African Americans who’d actually been encouraged to register by confused bureaucrats.

How many Fox News primetime hits did DeSantis garner for signing the anti-transgender laws that forever altered the lives of Floridians like Hayden, a 25-year-old transgender woman who told a reporter about the stepped-up harassment and having to make a 14-hour round trip journey to North Carolina for gender-affirming medicine because of repressive new laws signed by the governor?

Did DeSantis edge even one inch closer to his White House aspirations when he dispatched minions to take over the state-run New College of Florida, to turn a small but acclaimed bastion of liberal arts and queer tolerance into a conservative campus keen on baseball recruiting — thus driving away talented students like Libby Harrity, who left behind a girlfriend and a scholarship for the winter chill of Massachusetts’ Hampshire College after their old school felt unwelcoming.

Was it really worth the headlines and the dude-bro backslaps on X/Twitter to trick some 35 migrants from Latin America who’d reached Texas — no, not Florida — onto an extravagantly taxpayer-funded charter jet with a fake promise of jobs in Boston, when they were actually dumped on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard in the dead of night? “The truth is I am worried,” one of frightened migrants, named Yesica, told NPR. “It will be whatever God wishes, no?”

They are just four of the many thousands — the women who lost their reproductive rights, the teachers looking for jobs out of state, and so many others — whose dreams were trampled for the ridiculously failed ambition of one man. DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign will be remembered as nothing more than a punchline. But the American carnage he imposed on everyday people to make himself feel big will stain the red clay of the Florida peninsula for many years to come.

Question: What is the “right” way for Dems / the left to show disapproval with Biden? If they feel like they have to vote for him no matter what...then he has no responsibility to the voters and is only marginally better than Trump? — Via PAUL McBLARTney (@JamieGlasheen) on X/Twitter

Answer: First, I’m going to dispute one part of your premise; I think that on most issues — especially on domestic policy, but also much foreign policy (such as Ukraine), Biden is a lot more than marginally better than Trump. Although you didn’t say it explicitly, the sticking point is mainly Gaza. I believe there’s a moral imperative for Democrats and any other Biden voters to make clear that this administration needs to make a ceasefire its priority, and convince Israel to focus on freeing the hostages rather than slaughtering civilians. I’m not expecting much from this (and some readers will be appalled when I endorse this) but I’m cool with the activists urging Democrats to write in the word “ceasefire” in New Hampshire (where Biden is also a write-in candidate). The White House needs to understand that a change in Middle East policy is needed long before November.

I should have known better. Solving the humanitarian crisis at America’s southern border in a humane and sensible fashion is a problem that has so far eluded the nation’s best and brightest policy makers, and certainly has flummoxed President Joe Biden. Why would readers of this newsletter be any different? None of you responded to last week’s question calling for ideas, so I promise to work harder on questions that will elicit a response.

📮This week’s question: Voter dissatisfaction with a Trump-Biden rematch has prompted more talk of voting for third-party candidates than any other election in recent memory. That includes the well-funded centrist group No Labels, which continues to flirt with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a nominal Democrat, and others. Should No Labels run a candidate, and would you consider voting for them? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Be sure to put “No Labels” in the subject line.

The American news media — from legacy newspapers to newfangled online startups — has been under assault on two fronts at the start of the new year. That was best highlighted in an out-of-way rural town — Ouray, Colorado, up in the mountains some 270 miles southwest of Colorado Springs — where the journalists of the Ouray County Plaindealer were shocked when every single copy of its weekly edition was stolen from all of its distribution boxes. The culprit has not been arrested and no motive can yet be proven, but everyone suspects it was an effort to stop locals from seeing the lead story — about partygoers arrested for the alleged rapes of a 17-year-old girl that occurred in the home of Ouray’s chief of police.

This was not the first story in recent months about shocking press-freedom abuses, including the police raid on a small-town Kansas newspaper and the arrest of a couple of Alabama journalists over a news leak. Nor was it the only sign of American journalism in crisis — although almost all of the bad news was economic. On a week the Dow and S&P 500 hit all-time highs, the job picture in newsrooms seemed to hit an all-time low. Reporters at the venerable Los Angeles Times walked out for a day to protest looming layoffs, while the edgy music site Pitchfork was downsized and folded into its parent company’s — GQ’s — magazine. Sports Illustrated, an iconic brand, also imploded, as a right-wing mogul bought the Baltimore Sun while confessing he’d only read it a few times.

It’s important to understand that these two seriously negative trends aren’t unrelated, but rather deeply intertwined. The weaker and smaller that most newsrooms become as journalism fails to find an economic formula that works for the internet age, the more assaults we are going to see on press freedom — either in the growing number of “news deserts” without local journalists at all, or because emboldened sheriffs and police chiefs and political hacks no longer fear the consequences of crossing the line. And things will get much, much worse if the man who calls the media “the enemy of the people” gets elected in November. Functioning newsrooms are a public good — just like your local school or hospital — and if the body politic can’t figure out how to make this work, then that will drive another nail into the coffin of the American Experiment.

Can you imagine, Donald Trump getting sworn in as president of the United States? Oh wait, it already happened in 2017! In fact, it was wild — Trump’s “American Carnage” address and sometimes violent protests, followed by the massive Women’s March. After a tortured explanation of why I was writing about all of this three days too late, I made a plea for citizens to finish what they’d started with that march, and stay active. I wrote: “JFK asked us, politely and eloquently, to give back to our country. Trump, in all his vainglorious rudeness, demands it of us. Many words have already been written about how the pressures of the Oval Office will test a TV-reality-star-turned-POTUS, but we all know that nothing will ever change Donald Trump. The real test in 2017 and beyond is on us.” Ponder how we did when you read, “JFK asked what we can do for country. Trump demands it.”

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