[Sadly, the problem isn’t just Trump — or DeSantis either. The
horror of our moment is the way the base of the Republican Party has
come to embrace the most extreme views and policies]
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TRUMP AND DESANTIS: (WHITE NATIONALIST) PEAS IN A POD  
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Clarence Lusane
May 21, 2023
tomdispatch [[link removed]]

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_ Sadly, the problem isn’t just Trump — or DeSantis either. The
horror of our moment is the way the base of the Republican Party has
come to embrace the most extreme views and policies _

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, by DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)

 

He appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who shocked the
nation with rulings that dramatically took away rights. He sided with
the racists who used “states’ rights” to push through
undemocratic policies locally. And he’s the only American president
who lost a reelection bid but returned to office in the following
election.

Yes, I’m thinking of former New York governor and Democrat Grover
Cleveland
[[link removed]] who
first won the presidency in 1884, lost his reelection bid in 1888,
only to successfully regain the presidency in 1892 against
then-incumbent Benjamin Harrison.

In 2024, Donald Trump hopes to repeat that history in all its ugliness
by becoming the second former president to recapture the White House.
And mind you, the consequences of that second Cleveland administration
were devastating. Three of his Supreme Court appointees — Melville
W. Fuller, Rufus W. Peckham, and Edward D. White — were part of the
majority in the crucial and devastating 1896 _Plessy v. Ferguson_
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that would sanction racial segregation across the nation and so
solidify an American apartheid system that didn’t end legally until
the landmark 1954 _Brown v. Board of Education_ decision.  

In a similar vein, it’s hard to imagine how destructive a second
Trump administration would be, given his first time in office. In
virtually every area of public policy, the Trump administration proved
a setback for women, people of color, working-class communities, LGBTQ
individuals, environmental advocates, and those fighting to expand
human and democratic rights. His three hyper-conservative Supreme
Court appointees helped overturn _Roe v. Wade_, taking away abortion
rights for millions without hesitation, while there have also been
significant setbacks
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the areas of gun safety, religious freedom, workers’ rights, and
more.

But in truth, it’s not the policymaking that Donald Trump truly
longs for. Above all, he clearly misses the corruption, cruelty, and
sense of power that came with his presidency. His dream of an
authoritarian state in which he can punish his enemies endlessly
without accountability (while enriching himself and his family) was
thwarted in 2020 when voters rejected his candidacy. The bitterness of
that loss still eats at his very being and drives his current
presidential bid. As he himself stated, in a second term he seeks
“retribution
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against one and all.

For those still in the Republican Party, Trump is once again the
overwhelming early favorite. While 61% of Americans don’t want him
as president again — 89% of Democrats and 64% of independents — a
whopping 76% of Republicans are Trumpian to the core, according to a
March 2023 Marist poll
[[link removed]]. If
impeachments, a slew of coming indictments, and a conviction for libel
don’t deter his GOP supporters — indeed, they seem to have had the
opposite effect — then it’s easy to see Trump winning the
nomination in a landslide.

Yet, in a number of ways, as the Republican Party continues to move
ever more to the right, MAGA has already evolved beyond him. Despite
the media oxygen he continues to consume, the current moment is less
about him than most of us believe. Just as Cleveland reflected the
growing racial retrenchment of the white South in the late 1800s,
Trump embodies the growing entrenchment of an ever more extremist wing
of American politics.

As hyper-MAGA losing Pennsylvania senatorial candidate Kathy
Barnette correctly stated
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“MAGA does not belong to President Trump.” In referring to the
ascendant far-right wing of the Republican Party last year, she
claimed that “our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s
values.” Rather it was “President Trump who shifted and aligned
with our values.” What she neglected to add was that his conversion
was completely transactional: he needed their support, and they needed
his.

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Buy the Book
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Once committed, Trump leaned fully into the politics of white
supremacy and white Christian nationalism that still animate the base
of the party and its most prominent leaders at the local, state, and
federal levels. Before, during, and since his presidency, he’s
hurled racist invective at every category of black Americans — black
women, black women journalists, black athletes, black elected
officials, black appointed officials, black law-enforcement officers,
black election workers, black prosecutors, black youth, black
countries, black historic figures, black activists, black-dominated
cities, and black political leaders. In rallies and speeches, he
regularly refers to any black person who holds him to account as a
“racist
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tapping into the prejudices of his base, a crew who nominally contend
that racism no longer exists.

Trump — and the most horrendous member of Congress, Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene — have championed the January 6th violent
insurrectionists. Only recently in a CNN town hall, he promised to
pardon
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large portion” of them, if reelected, to the cheers of his
supporters who conveniently ignore the fact that he didn’t pardon
them in his last two weeks as president.

It should be noted that, in his time in office, he failed to keep any
of the major promises he made on the campaign trail, including
building that border wall, ending Obamacare, passing an infrastructure
bill, and lowering the cost of prescription drugs. His one signature
piece of legislation proved to be a tax cut
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transferred billions of dollars to the already super-rich. His other
big achievement, of course, was to stack the Supreme Court with those
three ultra-conservative justices who have taken away rights,
including the 50-year-old national right to an abortion.
[[link removed].]

Despite an impulse to hide the most draconian aspects of the GOP
policy agenda, it can be glimpsed via Republican initiatives in
Congress and those of governors and Republican-controlled state
legislatures. At the moment, their far-right trek towards
authoritarianism remains largely in sync with Trump’s political and
personal aspirations for power.

THE DESANTIS DILEMMA

There is remarkably little difference between Trump and his main
challengers for the presidential nomination when it comes to the
politics and policies of the contemporary Republican Party. Take
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

For much of the last year, the mainstream media
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its attention on a potential cage match between a resurgent Trump and
the now politically deflating DeSantis. It was the undisciplined
populist versus the inflexible ideologue, the former president’s
ability to articulate the most dangerous far-right ideas against
DeSantis’s proven ability to actually implement them.

For many on the left
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in the progressive world, the debate has been over which of them would
be worse, which would be quicker to destroy the country. Would
DeSantis’s less chaotic approach ultimately be worse than that of
the scandal-magnet Trump? Would a growing list of potential
indictments benefit or harm Trump? Who would prevail in the battle of
the brands — Make America Great Again (MAGA) or Make Florida America
(MFA)?

In the end, the differences between the two of them are likely to
prove superficial indeed. In the areas where Americans would be most
severely affected, there’s hardly a fly’s hair of separation
between them. Beyond the fact that both are mercurial, petty,
narcissistic bigots, as well as textbook definitions of toxic
masculinity, it’s in the realm of politics and public policy where
they might take somewhat different roads that, unfortunately, would
head this country toward the very same destination: an undemocratic,
authoritarian state whose foundational creed would be racism and
unrelenting bigotry.

A dive into the policy wasteland of both reveals a distinctly
unsurprising convergence. DeSantis has become infamous for
the anti-woke initiatives
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have roiled Florida’s education system from elementary school to
college. Books have been (figuratively and perhaps literally) burned,
teachers fired, school boards overthrown, and — from English and
history to math and social science — curriculums revamped to fit a
right-wing agenda. Almost singlehandedly, the governor has pushed
through “anti-woke” policies and signed legislation aimed at
reconstructing the state’s education system from top to bottom.

It should be recalled, however, that Trump was no slouch when it came
to attacking wokeness. On September 4, 2020, he ordered the White
House Office of Management and Budget to issue a memorandum
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directed federal agencies “to begin to identify all contracts or
other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race
theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or
propaganda” that might suggest the United States is a racist
country. The goal was to cut funding and cancel contracts related to
programs or training supposedly employing such concepts.

In September 2020, with only two months left in office, in a move
likely meant to counter the actions of DeSantis, Trump launched a
“1776 Commission
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whose purpose was to develop a curriculum that would promote a
“patriotic education” about race and the nation’s history. This
was a pathetic effort to refute the _New York Times’s_ “1619
Project” that argued slavery and racism were central to the birth of
the nation, a theory that has driven conservatives into a frenzied
state of panic.

Cynically, that commission issued its “1776 Report
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on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — January 18, 2021 — only two days
before Trump left office in humiliation. It would be soundly
criticized for its host of inaccuracies, its right-wing ideological
bent, and even plagiarism
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whitewashed American history, its founders, and their racism. A second
Trump administration would undoubtedly go all in to put DeSantis in
the shade by presenting a distinctly falsified, though politically
useful version of that history.

SUPPRESSING THE VOTE AND CHEERING STREET VIOLENCE

DeSantis’s ideological opposition to abortion is in sync with
Trump’s transactional one. While some GOP big names are calling for
a national ban, both DeSantis and Trump are trying to find a sweet
spot where they can build support, especially among evangelical
extremists, while still retaining some possibility of winning educated
white suburban women. Unlikely as that is, in a distinctly cowardly
move, DeSantis signed his extreme Florida anti-abortion law
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on a Thursday night behind closed doors, while Trump continues
to fume
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worry (legitimately) about paying the cost for losing women voters in
a general election.

DeSantis loves to highlight the work of his Gestapo-like election
police
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as his contribution to enforcing “voter integrity.” Established in
2022, the unit operates out of Florida’s Office of Election Crimes
and Security (OECS) and includes a statewide prosecutor. It will
undoubtedly shock no one that most of those arrested in its initial
months were overwhelmingly people of color. Virtually all of them were
dealing with a confusing election system that had restored voting
rights to some but not all ex-felons. (That system had, in fact,
actually issued voter ID cards to former felons who weren’t
eligible.) DeSantis proudly praised the arrests, no matter that most
of them were later tossed out of court. In fact, local prosecutors
refused hundreds of OECS referrals.

In terms of voting rights, though, has DeSantis topped Trump’s
effort to throw out millions of black votes, attack black election
workers, and have his Justice Department support every
voter-suppression policy passed by GOP state legislatures? Not yet, he
hasn’t. And don’t forget that Trump also created an ill-fated,
disingenuous Presidential Commission on Election Integrity
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months of taking office in 2017. Its real purpose was to collect state
election data and weaponize it against Democratic voters. That effort,
however, proved so clumsily fraudulent that even Republican-controlled
states refused to submit information and the Commission was dissolved
within seven months. Six years later, with the clear aim of
suppressing Democratic and black voters, Trump has been calling for
same-day-only in-person voting with paper ballots.

And finally, don’t forget how both Trump and DeSantis (as well as
Texas Governor Greg Abbott) have brazenly celebrated the street
violence perpetrated by armed white men. Trump hosted Kyle
Rittenhouse
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Mar-a-Lago in November 2021. Rittenhouse had shot and killed Anthony
Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, while wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, during
racial-justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. He became
a _cause célèbre_ of the far-right media and the MAGA movement and
was eventually found not guilty, leading to Trump’s invitation. The
former president has also loudly pledged to pardon charged or
convicted violent January 6th insurrectionists.

Not to be outdone, DeSantis recently praised Daniel Penny
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killed Jordan Neely, a slim, young black man having a mental health
crisis on a New York City subway car. Penny, a trained ex-Marine,
applied a chokehold for many minutes. Neely’s death was ruled a
homicide
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Penny has now been arrested for it. Far-right Republicans were quick
to issue statements of solidarity and to support fundraising for his
legal case. DeSantis referred to Penny as a “good Samaritan” and
shared a link to his fundraising page, while somehow associating the
incident with that number one billionaire scoundrel for conservatives,
George Soros.  

By their behavior and words, Trump and DeSantis provide a permission
zone for white nationalist violence.

In the end, the two of them aren’t so much highlighting their
differences as competing to see who can be the most extreme, issue by
issue. As Trump made clear in his recent CNN town hall —
functionally, a Trump rally — he has no intention of tacking towards
the middle. Quite the opposite, as he heads for Election Day 2024, his
hurricane of lies will only grow more extreme, shameless, and
dangerous, while the GOP base cheers him on.

DeSantis has, so far, been reduced to running against Trump on the
issue of “electability
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He claims Trump can’t win in a general election – possibly true
(if the economy doesn’t go into recession) – and is calling on GOP
voters to put aside their Trumpian passions and be more practical.
Essentially, this is the same argument being made by other soon-to-be
also-rans like former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Trump
Vice President Mike Pence, and Senator Tim Scott. They all cower when
it comes to really going after Trump, becoming instead the political
equivalents of passive-aggressive 13-year-olds. Even former New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie
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who may join the race and has gone from frenemy to all-out
never-Trumper, has shown little divergence from the former
president’s most basic policies.

TRUMP MISSES THE CORRUPTION, CRUELTY, AND POWER

What distinguishes DeSantis from the rest of the pack and aligns him
more fully with The Donald is that they both have an urge to be cruel
for no other reason than that they can be. Few political leaders have
ever been quite as thin-skinned as Trump. His pettiness is legendary,
while it clearly gives him pleasure to inflict pain
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others. DeSantis
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a similar personality. His treatment of immigrants, the way he
describes LGBTQ individuals, and his press releases and speeches
against any perceived opponent are filled to the brim with invective
and venom.

DeSantis’s Make Florida America, or MFA, is a genuine threat and his
own version of a MAGA move. A Trump or DeSantis administration would
ensure at least four long years of brutal retaliation and murderous
policies through the prism of white nationalist Great Replacement
rhetoric.

Sadly, the problem isn’t just Trump — or rather it’s not only
Trump — or DeSantis either. The horror of our moment is the way the
base of the contemporary Republican Party has come to embrace the most
extreme views and policies around.

So, here’s a final question for this difficult moment: In a forest
of fascism, does it matter which tree is the tallest?

Copyright 2023 Clarence Lusane

Featured image: IMG_3106
[[link removed]] by Matt
Johnson [[link removed]] is licensed
under CC BY 2.0 [[link removed]] /
Flickr

_Follow _TomDispatch _on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, _Songlands
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final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel _Every Body Has a Story
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Tom Engelhardt’s _A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s _In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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Dower’s _The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
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Ann Jones’s_ They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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CLARENCE LUSANE, a _TomDispatch_ regular
[[link removed]], is a political
science professor and interim political science department chair at
Howard University, and Independent Expert to the European Commission
Against Racism and Intolerance. His latest book is _Twenty Dollars
and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice
and Democracy_
[[link removed]] (City
Lights).

* Donald Trump
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* Ron DeSantis
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* white nationalism
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* Republican Party
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