I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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Late Friday afternoon, Ron DeSantis’s Twitter feed pushed out a video so full of harsh and ostentatiously hate-filled anti-LGBT tropes even some Republicans were appalled by it.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign shared a provocative video on Friday attacking the record of former President Donald J. Trump regarding L.G.B.T.Q. people that was widely condemned as homophobic, including by a prominent group representing gay and lesbian Republicans.
The video, posted on Twitter by the “DeSantis War Room” account, opens by showing Mr. Trump proclaiming, “I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens.” Mr. Trump made those remarks at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, after invoking the horror of the Pulse nightclub shooting the previous month. The massacre, at a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, in Mr. DeSantis’s home state of Florida, left 49 people dead.
The video goes on to show Mr. Trump expressing support for transgender people using the bathrooms of their choice. It then attempts to contrast Mr. Trump’s position with the hard-line stance of Mr. DeSantis, abruptly transitioning into a jarring series of images of Mr. DeSantis (including one with lasers shooting out of his eyes) that are interspersed with right-wing internet memes (the smiling, heavily muscled man known online as “GigaChad”), news headlines (“Pride event in St. Cloud canceled after DeSantis signs ‘Protection of Children Act’ into law”) and pop culture references (among them shots of the titular character from the film version of the serial killer narrative “American Psycho”).
Much has already been written about this episode of presidential campaign Hari-kari, but two crucial points are not getting enough attention.
First, this is yet another example of the bewildering incompetence of the DeSantis campaign. A pro-DeSantis Twitter feed produced this bizarre video, and the campaign’s Twitter War Room account pushed it out, apparently oblivious to the political damage that it could do. A smart presidential campaign would not have touched this video — which, as noted above, twice compares DeSantis to a serial killer and positively notes that legislation passed in Florida puts the lives of trans kids in danger — with a ten-foot pole.
The problem, however, is more than just lousy staff. This episode is emblematic of a candidate and campaign that is terminally online and obsessively focused on the various right-wing outrages that drive social media. This gets to something that the Bulwark’s Tim Miller wrote a few months ago in comparing the faltering DeSantis campaign to that of 2020 Democratic contender Elizabeth Warren.
DeSantis has … launched himself at every culture war fight to hit Twitter in the last six months, from daring the government to come and take his gas stove to obsessing over whether Disney characters are gay to a ludicrous crudités-esque grocery-store interview with conservative meme warrior Benny Johnson in which he claimed he will never again drink Bud Light as a result of a single social media promotion featuring a trans person.
These attempts to please the most social-media-brain-poisoned posters in their respective bases might have seemed like a good strategy on its face. It’s good for #engagement numbers, and campaigns can convince themselves that there are real-life people who are influenced by these influencers.
The actual result for both? Lots of praise from highly educated nerds who tweet obsessively about politics or are paid to create content for partisan outlets—and from everyone else a sense that the candidate is a creature from another planet.
Right on cue, DeSantis showed up in New York City last week for an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Waters to weigh in on the latest right-wing outrage: NYC’s efforts to regulate coal-fired pizza parlors. It led to this picture, which makes the comparisons to Patrick Bateman in American Psycho feel a bit too on the nose.
One of my recurrent themes about GOP politics this year is that Republicans are hopelessly out of touch with the American electorate.
We saw this when Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered the GOP’s response to the State of the Union and accused Joe Biden of being “the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is” and claimed that his “administration has been completely hijacked by the radical left.” There has been a steady stream of right-wing boycotts of Bud Light, Target, Kohl’s, Chick-fil-A, and any other major company with the audacity to show basic humanity toward LGBTQ+ Americans. Nikki Haley, more recently, picked up this mantle and called the participation of biological boys in girl’s sports the “women’s issue of our time.”
But no candidate has more aggressively leaped into the conservative fever swamp than DeSantis. Aside from his obsessions with trans issues, attacking the “woke mind virus,” and his dalliance with gas stoves, and Bud Light outrage, DeSantis has focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and ESG guidelines, which takes into account environmental, social, and governance concerns when making investment decisions. DeSantis has also railed against CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) and even signed legislation in Florida outlawing them.
What do these issues have in common? Virtually no one outside the terminally online conservative base understands or cares about any of this stuff. I’m not even convinced that most online conservatives genuinely care. These issues are the obsession of a small group of fringe activists with way too much free time on their hands. These words could also describe the lion’s share of Twitter activists, no matter their political persuasion.
Indeed, the direct parallel to DeSantis’s obsessive focus on trans issues is Elizabeth Warren’s self-defeating decision in 2019 to respond to online Bernie Sanders fans and lay out how she would pay for a Medicare-for-all health care bill. Few outside the cloistered world of Twitter cared, and the plan, which called for massive tax increases on businesses and billionaires to pay for more than $20 trillion in new health care spending, helped speed her political decline.
I’m not making a substantive comparison between Warren and DeSantis but rather pointing out the political peril in believing that what happens on social media truly matters in American politics. The reality is that few Americans are on Twitter, and few follow the never-ending series of online outrages that possess such currency there.
As I noted a few months ago, when DeSantis traveled to Iowa (before announcing his presidential campaign), he barely mentioned the economy. Instead, he talked about the evils of wokeness and Dr. Anthony Facui and bragged about sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Little appears to have changed since then. If anything, DeSantis (who announced his candidacy for president on Twitter) has since gotten “more online.”
The irony of the situation is that DeSantis, unlike most Republican candidates seeking the presidency, had a solid political foundation on which to run. He’s the two-term governor of the country’s third-largest state, and he won re-election last Fall by double digits in a place that used to be a swing state. He could have run as an outsider with a host of policy accomplishments and a record of winning over Republicans, independents, and even some Democrats at the ballot box (in contrast to Trump).
Instead, he has chosen to cast himself as the outrage candidate, who is the scourge of woke liberals and is even angrier and more hate-filled than Trump. Not only has this gained him no traction in the Republican primary, but even if he bests the former president, it’s hard to see how it helps wins over a single non-Republican voter.
There is a larger lesson here for Republicans — weighing on every online outrage and focusing one’s appeals to the party’s meshuggeneh base is not a winning strategy (no one will out-meshuggeneh Trump). The true alternative to Trump would be a right-winger focused on steadiness, competence, and electability. I’m not saying that such a candidate would win the 2024 GOP nod, but at the very least, it would make for an interesting and useful political contrast. All DeSantis has done is turn himself into a clown to win over the votes of the worst members of the Republican Party.
Putting aside the Republican nomination fight, the GOP, as a party, is putting itself in an enormous hole with this political strategy. DeSantis might be the most online presidential candidate, but there are plenty of Republican members of Congress who are treading the same path. The anti-trans video that the DeSantis team pushed out is so angry and hate-filled that it would likely cost him the support of non-online Republicans — and repulse Democrats and many independents. That strategy might work for red-state Republicans, but it’s a loser when you run for president. Moreover, it plays directly into the hands of Democratic accusations that Republicans are held captive by an extremist and malevolent political fringe. If Republicans want to win national elections again — and compete effectively in blue and purple states — they should start with one simple decision: get the hell offline.
What’s Going On
For MSNBC, I wrote about the hypocrisy of conservative criticisms of judicial activism.
Interesting piece by Pat Garafolo on how Western Pennsylvania Democrats are laying out an interesting and potentially effective political strategy.
The Washington Post looks at how hundreds of migrants died in a capsized boat, and the Greek government did nothing to help.
A wonderful piece by Sally Jenkins on the 50-year rivalry/friendship of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.
Musical Interlude
Bravo! Great post Michael!