DeSantis is bad, but Trump is still worse

Yes, I’m doubling down on the argument of my guest essay in the New York Times

One of many tweets criticizing my op-ed on Twitter.

Today will be the first of two posts written in response to the tidal wave of criticism I’ve received on Twitter since my op-ed was published on Monday. The second post will appear on Friday. I’m going to keep the paywall down on both of these posts, so the largest possible audience can read my replies. (Only the audio version of the post at the very bottom will be behind the paywall.)

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So how have you been these past couple of days?

Early on in my Monday post, I predicted I’d end up “embroiled in a shitstorm through much of this week” because of my New York Times op-ed arguing that, although Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would be a bad president, former president Donald Trump returning to the White House would be worse.

I sure got the shitstorm part right!

My Twitter mentions have been a mess for two days now. But there is at least one advantage to confronting criticism emanating from a single ideological precinct online (in this case, intensely combative progressives): Its univocal quality makes summarizing and responding to it more efficient than one might expect. Here is how I’d paraphrase what I’ve heard over and over again on Twitter since Monday morning:

The Republican Party has been trending fascist since at least the 1990s, if not since Dwight D. Eisenhower. They’re all fascists now, so it doesn’t much matter which one of them rises to power. But that said, Trump is a moron, and he can’t win the presidency again anyway. Meanwhile, DeSantis is the real deal—a true, honest-to-goodness fascist who’s shown himself to be intelligent and competent. Only a straight, rich, white man like Linker could be indifferent to this threat, let alone welcome the jackboot, as Linker clearly does. That’s exactly what I’d expect from the trans-hating New York Times, which also started out liking Hitler, did everything it could to normalize Trump, and now clearly wants to make DeSantis president. But the most galling thing of all is that Linker calls himself a liberal. On what planet is that true? He sometimes calls himself a centrist, and at times he’s written things critical of Democrats and progressives. That obviously makes him a center-right fascism-enabler!

The Omnipresent F-Word

Let’s start at the top, with the fascism claim. (I’ll get to the bit about the New York Times and my liberalism on Friday.)

I’ve written on this and related subjects on numerous occasions. Here’s where I come down: There are troubling antecedents to the contemporary antiliberal right going far back into the American past—to the antebellum South and the racial terrorism of Jim Crow; to the Old Right’s paranoid antimodernism and conspiracism in the interwar and postwar periods; to George Wallace’s surprisingly potent post-segregationist run for the White House in 1968 as a cultural populist. That faction of the right was part of the electoral coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, but it was very much a junior partner in it.

It remained so through the presidency of George W. Bush. But over the next three election cycles, it struggled to seize control of the GOP and finally achieved it with Donald Trump’s hostile takeover during the 2016 primaries. The junior partners have run the show since.

There are undeniably fascist strands on the American intellectual right today—in the ideas of various Silicon Valley figures, in certain sub-factions of the Straussian world, among some of those affiliated with the Claremont Institute, within the militia movement, and in the grandiose ambitions of those who serve as Pied Pipers to legions of online trolls. Trump’s presidency also displayed numerous fasc-ish tendencies even before the shocking events that transpired during his final two months in office.

But Ronald Reagan was not a fascist.

George H. W. Bush was not a fascist.

George W. Bush was not and is not a fascist.

John McCain was not a fascist.

Mitt Romney was not and is not a fascist.

But what about Ron DeSantis? To answer that question, we first have to ask if Hungarian president Viktor Orbán is a fascist.

That’s because DeSantis is clearly modeling some of his culture-war initiatives on things Orbán has done in office. Yet I don’t think it’s accurate to call Orbán a fascist. He’s some kind of soft authoritarian or illiberal democrat—both of which are very bad. I think, likewise, that much of what DeSantis is doing in Florida—for example, his moves to severely restrict academic freedom at public universities in the state—is atrocious. But using a landslide victory in his re-election bid as leverage to impose a conservative clampdown on publicly funded universities is not fascism. It’s a power grab from the right that liberals should be fighting hard. But reaching for the most hyperbolic epithet they can think of and hurling it at him and his supporters on social media isn’t fighting hard. It’s a panic attack.

President Trump v. President DeSantis

Just in case that last paragraph wasn’t clear, let me repeat what I said in the op-ed (not that this prevented willful misreadings): It would be very bad for DeSantis to be elected president. Liberals, I wrote, “should fight with all they have to prevent it.”

But of course, that wasn’t my main point. My main point was to argue that even though a DeSantis presidency would be very bad, a second Trump presidency would be even worse. Somehow large numbers of people interpreted this argument to mean I think a DeSantis presidency would be just fine, maybe even pretty good. I honestly don’t know what to say to that, since I wrote and implied nothing of the sort.

What I pretty clearly did imply is that if given a choice between two bad options—President Trump or President DeSantis being inaugurated in January 2025—I would prefer the latter. Why? Because DeSantis, unlike Trump, is not a characterological and temperamental train wreck. That’s an important consideration in judging potential presidents.

Take DeSantis’ recent comments about foreign policy. Do I like them? Not at all. I strongly favor the Biden administration’s pragmatic internationalism, including its strong but cautious support for Ukraine in its defense against Russian military aggression. DeSantis expressed considerable skepticism of this policy. On this issue alone, I would vote for Biden over DeSantis without the slightest hesitation.

Yet despite its wrongness, DeSantis’ position—dissent from Biden administration policy on both hawkish grounds (vis-à-vis China) and in terms of fiscal prudence, while steering clear of Trump’s Putin-friendly boast that he’d end the war within 24 hours of returning to office—nonetheless showed signs of thoughtfulness, deliberation, and discipline behind the scenes. Trump’s position, by contrast, flows entirely from his tormented, impulsive, capricious, and mercurial psyche.

That is always the case with Trump. In a recent Substack post, Matt Yglesias helpfully reminded us of Trump’s behavior in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic:  

Trump … was flaky and weird around COVID-19. He would alternate between his racist “China virus” routine and insisting the virus was no big deal. Some factions of his administration were very seriously pursuing a lab leak theory while others were pursuing crank cures. Before deciding the virus was no problem at all, Trump had a brief period as a serious COVID hawk who implemented a short-lived nationwide economic shutdown. But before that, he was insisting that everything was fine thanks to his confidence in the Chinese government.

I’ll be blunt: This is insane behavior for a president in the midst of a major crisis. That the United States and the world somehow survived four years of this man serving as commander-in-chief was just dumb luck. Americans need to be doing everything we possibly can to ensure we don’t end up having to hope for a second miracle.

And note that I’ve barely mentioned the appalling events of January 6, 2021.

So I’ll be blunt again: Insisting it is transparently, indisputably obvious that Ron DeSantis, or really anyone, would be much worse than the second term of a man who attempted to keep himself in power by way of a self-coup the last time he held the office is simply not a reasonable position.

Keeping Our Heads

That brings me to the crux of the matter: Why did I even write this op-ed? Aren’t both men terrible, just in somewhat different ways? Why insist that Trump is worse, which can’t help but imply that DeSantis is at least somewhat good in the sense of comparatively better than Trump?

I wrote the piece for a simple reason: Because I’ve already seen lots of liberals advancing the position that DeSantis would be just as bad as, or even worse than, Trump—and I think this is foolish, both in substantive terms, and as a matter of political tactics.      

Trump wanted to do bad things as president, but he was also extremely dangerous at the personal level. The man attempted to overturn a free and fair election! He would have liked nothing more than to have himself installed as a dictator! I honestly don’t think DeSantis will try something like that. His badness is a function of relative competence at trying to do the same kinds of bad stuff Trump attempted but couldn’t. (Though Trump and his team could well prove much better at it the second time around, if they get the chance.)

That brings me to my second point—about tactics (specifically for the 2024 general election).

The whole country saw what Trump attempted in the two months between Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021. Most knew it was very bad. If those same people hear liberals screaming that a man who won his campaign for re-election in a large, highly diverse state by a nearly 20-point margin is just as bad as or worse than Trump, some will understandably roll their eyes and assume it’s an example of crying wolf. That will badly undermine the liberal case. DeSantis’ threat is subtler and less acute than the one Trump posed (and for now, could pose again).

What I want is for liberals to calm down and make their case in specific terms that steadfastly avoid hyperbole. Just tell us what DeSantis is doing and explain why it’s bad—including why it’s un-American, illiberal bullying—and resist the temptation to give vent to what haunts us during our worst political night terrors. (Yes, that includes not calling DeSantis a fascist every five minutes between now and November 2024.)

We need to keep our heads. That’s the message. And unfortunately, if the response to my op-ed is any indication, it’s one to which plenty of online liberals have no intention at all of listening.