Stop giving Ron DeSantis the national attention he wants
The Florida governor's meteoric rise in popularity is a problem the media created. It's not too late to fix it.
Ron DeSantis wears an armor thicker than the patches of water lilies that pepper his peninsula. It is an armor insulated by the fault lines of a media ecosystem that has long misdiagnosed what is clear to the naked eye. He carries a shield impenetrable to reproach, one that allows him to respond to an honest question with an attack and then blame the crime on the victim without punishment. These complaints, heinous as they are, get summarized under the umbrella of ambition, coddled through a compulsion of habit and codified in a language suitable for mass media consumption. Positive results are filtered through the foggy lens of conservatism and intentional harm through the hazy prism of controversy. There is always a defense when the indefensible isn’t called what it is, when the blatant theft of truth is repackaged as a perspective worth listening to, a different opinion worth considering.
The enablement the governor of Florida feels is a byproduct of the framing of a man in charge of one state as if the policies he enacts impact all 50, anointing DeSantis as a frontrunner for president and picking apart a pandemic response that has enough redeemable results to cover up the unimpeachable malice. A fawning profile generates national intrigue. An investigative piece on his COVID-19 mismanagement, especially one with weak reporting, boosts DeSantis’ standing among his base. If journalists show up to a press conference expecting to hold the governor accountable as their job demands, DeSantis will lace up his boxing gloves and deploy a Trumpian pugilism that makes him appear presidential in the eyes of his party. And if a reporter does succeed in blindsiding DeSantis with a question he can’t answer, he can always open the What-About-Cuomo escape hatch and move on to the next question unscathed. DeSantis, it seems, can’t lose.
Except he can lose.
He can lose if the beltway press stops covering each non-essential step he takes. Stop weighing his decisions against a calculus of how it affects his ascension to higher office instead of how it affects his constituents. Stop blasting his tactile ballistic missiles of white grievance on Twitter. Stop inserting an image of him looking all poised and serious above an anchor’s shoulder on network news with the word “president” in the chyron. Stop speculating about the likelihood of him joining the race. Stop speculating about the likelihood of him winning the race. Stop propping him up like Donald Trump and begin to realize the impact of not covering his every move.
Leave it to local and state reporters to keep tabs on DeSantis’ regular discriminatory legislative battles as he wages the Republican culture war du jour. If his name continues to clog the coast-to-coast airwaves and fill the pages of print in national newspapers and magazines, he will seize control of the Republican primaries as easily as the white supremacist terrorists he helped embolden seized control of the Capitol. The media can help get him there. Or it could not.
The danger DeSantis would usher into the Oval Office is obvious. He has been more willing than several of his GOP compatriots to bend his knee at the feet of Trump. This includes lying about the results of a free and fair election, a seditious act that hardly makes him an outsider in his own party. But he also employs a vicious brand of political opportunism that is more polished than his possible future presidential primary opponents, one that could prove even more catastrophic than a Trump presidency. The platform he’s procured with deft manipulation and racist dog-whistling has vaulted DeSantis to center stage of a troupe of racist dog-whistlers who could all reasonably challenge the Democratic nominee in 2024.
Chris Christie, who, it was recently reported, is eyeing a run for president, was so desperate to cozy up to the coterie that he almost died of coronavirus and likely lost Republican support when he was released from the hospital and started encouraging people to wear masks. Ted Cruz will continue to do whatever he thinks is necessary to remain relevant three years from now; it’s not hard to envision DeSantis excoriating Cruz on a debate stage for his careless gaffes, namely this one. Mike Pence, who narrowly avoided a hanging three months ago, would struggle to outpoll DeSantis if there were enough popular laws — like voter suppression bills so restrictive they would prevent the Florida governor himself from voting if he were a private citizen — DeSantis can point to pushing through while Pence sat on the sidelines. Mitt Romney opposed sedition too early in the process; Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton and Kristi Noem may be another election cycle away from gathering the same type of widespread approval as DeSantis; and if Josh Hawley, Tucker Carlson or anyone with the surname Trump can mount any semblance of a serious campaign, that will be even greater cause for alarm.
Unlike the narrative that has been repeated ad nauseam, DeSantis’ sudden cachet isn’t due to a triumph in the face of COVID. It’s his triumph in the face of media scrutiny, especially the comparisons to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that have since backfired spectacularly. If DeSantis indeed seeks higher office — a move that will be as much a slam dunk as Zion Williamson choosing to go one-and-done, if GOP polling continues to lean in his favor — the former Yale baseball player will spend more time taking swings at the media than he will patting himself on the back for hitting a home run during the pandemic. His campaign will be a well-trodden crusade against the “radical left” and the “so-called journalists” who stand in his way. Grievance will beget gloating, not the other way around.
As for the media’s outlook on the order of things, DeSantis’ rise will be perceived not as an outgrowth of increased national spotlight, but rather as a sign that his style of governance resonates on a countrywide scale. But when DeSantis’ modus operandi is to intensely ridicule his detractors, whose purpose does it serve to be hypercritical of a man still three years removed from an opportunity to take over the White House?
The news media is responsible for elevating DeSantis and broadening his appeal. (And let’s be clear here: “news media” doesn’t refer to right-wing propaganda machine Fox News or other fascism friendly outlets. DeSantis could have had all the Carlson and Sean Hannity appearances he desires and still been a relative unknown. It’s the glossy magazine cover stories and titles like the New York Times’ Could Ron DeSantis Be Trump’s G.O.P. Heir? that have nudged him further into the presidential fold.) The 42-year-old knew what he was doing high-fiving the maskless masses at a Trump rally as constituents struggled to breathe from a deadly pandemic and bullying a CNN reporter at a press conference mid-inquiry with the belligerent comment, “Are you going to make a speech or are you going to ask a question?” DeSantis consistently set the criticism bait trap, and, as with any far-right personality who tweets something outrageously bigoted to receive peak engagement, journalists bit. They kept biting until DeSantis was swimming in an ocean of headlines and airtime, floating toward the national profile he now commands.
The mainstream press can, unlike the police DeSantis so fervently salutes, de-escalate a potentially harmful situation by not responding to his every move as if he’s already occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s not too late, but it will be soon.
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An argument for covering DeSantis as if he’s already leading a presidential race in 2024 is that by ignoring him, it opens the door for someone with even more authoritarian aspirations to take his place. The retort to this fear is simple: Don’t treat politicians (or gun-toting extremists, QAnon followers, and whatever Madison Cawthorn was doing before he became a politician) as legitimate candidates to serve America when the values they espouse are unequivocally un-American. Where to draw the line at “un-American” is up for debate — and historically complex — but objecting to the results of a free and fair election, no matter how en vogue this has become to the GOP, needs to be high up on that list.
DeSantis may have built a strong résumé in the eyes of the people paid to cover politics like sports, but the Florida governor is no longer a college athlete. We don’t have to over-evaluate the prospects of DeSantis running for president like we over-evaluate the prospects of Williamson going pro. To my knowledge, Williamson hasn’t threatened the fabric of democracy since joining the Pelicans. DeSantis has already chosen power over democracy, and if there are no proper guardrails in place to keep the former in check, the state of the latter is in peril.
The press has a vital role in holding that fabric together. The failure to gauge the integrity of the fabric was immensely fatal from 2016-2020; it was torn again on January 6; and the fabric remains fraught until the media can reshape its priorities. A start is by cooling it on the DeSantis swooning and only use the term “presidential hopeful” on actual candidates who sincerely aim to restore the hope a president should bring.