Florida

A bipartisan Coalition of the Willing that includes the last two presidents, the media and nearly everyone else on the left, plus Trump loyalists, has united to try to sink Ron DeSantis’s candidacy before it begins. DeSantis has been savaged by the press for keeping Florida open during the pandemic and for fighting culture wars, yet voters still gave him a nearly twenty-point win in November. At that time, however, the right was united behind him. Can he now survive amid more relentless and bipartisan attacks? Consider some of the hit pieces/obituaries that have sought to sink DeSantis's presidential candidacy in recent weeks. NBC News: “‘I think he’s in trouble’: Growing number of Ron DeSantis donors and allies hope for a shake-up.

Maybe Niccolò Machiavelli was not the first political consultant, but he remains one of the best. Ron DeSantis might solicit his advice before deciding whether a 2024 campaign for the White House is wise. DeSantis could start with the penultimate chapter of The Prince, “What Fortune can do in human affairs, and how it can be resisted,” which is famous for its imagery. Machiavelli first likens fortune to a raging river, whose flood cannot be met head on but whose fury can be dissipated by dams and dykes built in advance. Later he says Fortune is a woman who yields to a young man who comes on strong, even roughly. The lesson for a forty-four-year-old DeSantis is obvious: seize the moment. She’s yours for the taking — if you’re bold.

The Republican Party’s fumbling response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade has caused some in the party to plead for a surrender. Disappointing midterms returns, a string of lost referenda and party in-fighting has led some right-wing commentators to tell the pro-life movement — in no uncertain terms — to get with the program and move on. But at least one presumed presidential hopeful didn’t get the memo. Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the “Heartbeat Protection Act” into law. Observers were quick to write his political obituary; it’s an aggressive move in the one of the most pro-choice red states. But it confirms his reputation as a principled conservative willing to expend political capital to achieve meaningful victories.

Donald Trump is one boomer Laura Loomer can't rely on. The right-wing provocateur came a few thousand votes shy of winning a safe GOP House seat in Florida last year, running a campaign in a district that contains The Villages while relying on "Boomers for Loomer." But there weren’t enough boomers for Loomer last time — and President Trump is now wavering in his support for her, even though he’s both endorsed her and voted for her in one of her previous failed runs for Congress. In tried and true Trumpworld fashion, a crazy Trump idea (in this case, forcing his campaign staff to hire Loomer for an unknown role) was floated to a journalist he trusts (as always, Maggie Haberman) at an outlet he loves reading (in this instance, the New York Times).

The first thing to understand about the indictment of Donald Trump by the Manhattan Grand Jury convened by the George Soros-funded District Attorney Alvin Bragg is that it is only incidentally a legal proceeding. Don’t be distracted by the avalanche of analyses that are poised to descend on the public. All the legal mumbo-jumbo is beside the point. At its core, the indictment of Donald Trump is a political exercise, not a legal proceeding. That is to say, it involves the deployment of state power against an individual, not the impartial application of the law.  Indeed, what is happening to Donald Trump is about the deliberate abrogation of the law in the service of power.

The woman with a starring role in perhaps the most talked about campaign ads of both the 2018 and 2022 election cycles wasn’t on the ballot. In both, a politician whose stock has risen as much as anyone’s in the last half decade was happy to let his wife do the talking. Five years ago, Casey DeSantis narrated a thirty-second clip in which she testified to her husband Ron’s admiration for Donald Trump. You’ve probably seen it. “Everyone knows my husband is endorsed by President Trump, but he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids,” says Casey. The ad cuts to footage of the Republican gubernatorial candidate building a toy wall with one child, reading The Art of the Deal to another, and so on. “People say he’s all Trump,” says Casey.

To this point in the early days of the Republican primary, all the major potshots have been coming from just one candidate, directed at just one other: Donald Trump taking aim repeatedly at Ron DeSantis. Much of the media conversation about this has focused on DeSantis's unwillingness to respond to any of these attacks: a deliberate choice that hasn't lowered the temperature or frequency of Trump's barbs, which now include comparing the Florida conservative to, gasp, Mitt Romney. But consider the possibility that at this moment, both men are making a political mistake. For DeSantis, the risks of non-response are that Trump defines him before he defines himself. Republican primary voters generally know who Ron DeSantis is and have an overwhelmingly positive view of him.

The game's afoot: MAGA Inc., a Donald Trump-associated super PAC, has lodged a formal complaint to the Florida Commission on Ethics against Ron DeSantis. The complaint alleges that the Florida governor is in breach of ethics laws by running for president without officially declaring. Cockburn detects a whiff of hypocrisy here: for a man who is always claiming to be the victim of legal warfare, Trump seems to be as willing as anyone to wield the sword of the law. The complaint argues that DeSantis is “leveraging his elected office and breaching his associated duties in a coordinated effort to develop his national profile, enrich himself and his political allies and influence the national electorate.

Fresh — or not so fresh — from his awkward and stilted State of the Union address, President Biden took his show on the road to Florida to stump against what he claims are Republican plans to cut (“sunset” in Beltway-speak) Social Security and Medicare. Apparently unaware that Florida is now an irretrievably red state, on Thursday the president spoke at the University of Tampa in what was widely received as a kickstart to his expected 2024 reelection campaign. Despite platitudes about bipartisanship, Biden targeted Florida Senator Rick Scott, a Republican who has floated a plan to review federal programs once every five years for reauthorization (though the plan does not specifically mention either Social Security or Medicare).

The world may not be turning upside down, but it’s certainly tilting. In the long shadow of the pandemic, with war on the European continent and the West and China entering a new cold war, the “new economy” of bits and bytes that was supposed to connect and shape the world has hit a rough patch. Meanwhile, the much disdained “old” economy of manufacturing, agriculture and energy is thriving. Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Snap and Google. Last year, media companies  lost $500 billion in value and tech firms have shed $4 trillion off their valuations. Industrial spaces are in high demand while downtown offices sit half-empty.