... according to Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsoeng and Tim Dickinson, Trump is mulling an assault on DeSantis from what would conventionally be described as the left.A couple of months ago, Rich Lowry, writing for The Washington Post, suggested that DeSantis is the true moderate, at least in terms of governing style:
In other words, instead of maligning his governor as a RINO squish the way he has described most Republican rivals, Trump will go after DeSantis for supporting budget austerity, “entitlement reform,” and free trade....
Trump famously abandoned austerity politics upon taking office in 2017, presiding over an orgy of tax-cutting and uninhibited spending. And while his failed assault on Obamacare included serial efforts to gut the Medicaid program that provides health care for low-income Americans, he distanced himself from the traditional GOP hunger to mess with Social Security and Medicare....
Discarding the green eyeshade of austerity was one of several voter-pleasing steps Trump took to detoxify conservative politics. Others were abandoning free-trade shibboleths that the GOP’s white working-class base intensely disliked and downplaying a reflexive defense-hawk tendency that predictably led to unpopular “forever wars.” On all these issues, the Rolling Stone report suggests, Trump will try to depict DeSantis as an Establishment figure who would bring back the bad old days....
Independents and centrists might find themselves disappointed or irked with a President DeSantis. But they’d be irked within normal parameters, not fearing that he’d burn the country down in a fit of rage because he thinks someone wasn’t being fair to him....We've already been told that DeSantis was a moderate in the early days of his first gubernatorial term, as in this New Yorker profile:
DeSantis, for all his pugnaciousness, colors inside the lines, operating within the traditionally defined powers of his office and the constitutional framework of government....
Every now and then, DeSantis takes the not-so-conservative path when it’s popular with his constituents. This doesn’t mean liberals will embrace him; it’s just an observation that a DeSantis presidency wouldn’t mean enduring four years of an inflexible, hardcore conservative. There would be occasional areas of agreement....
In office, DeSantis took steps that suggested he intended to govern closer to the center. He buoyed environmentalists by forcing out the nine-member board of the South Florida Water Management District, political appointees who were considered hostile to environmental interests. He named a commission to tackle algae blooms, which befouled rivers and lakes in the southern part of the state. And he appointed several Black jurists. At his inauguration, DeSantis asked the Reverend R. B. Holmes, the pastor of a predominantly Black church in Tallahassee, to lead the prayer.I tell you all this because one of these two men will by the 2024 Republican presidential nominee -- and whichever one it is, we'll be told that, thankfully, GOP voters have chosen the moderate one.
If it's Trump, we'll be told that he isn't an abortion extremist, doesn't want to gut entitlements, and isn't a hawk. If it's DeSantis, we'll be told that he's not a monomaniacal narcissist, he's serious about governing, and he occasionally thinks like a centrist. Heck, he raised teachers' salaries! (Experienced teachers in Florida are still among the lowest paid in the country, however.)
Either way, as we go into the general election, the mainstream media will probably be telling us that the Republican candidate is a right-centrist, even as the right-wing media is telling its audience that Joe Biden is a radical leftist. That's how it usually goes in America. It's amazing Democrats ever win the Electoral College.
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