Ron DeSantis, King of the Jerks

America will be in trouble as long as Republicans believe they benefit from driving our politics into the gutter

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at the Unite and Win Rally in support of Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano on August 19, 2022 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

My “brand” as a writer is empathy and equanimity, even toward those with whom I have strong political disagreements. Not that I always live up to those standards. But I try to, and I think most of the posts I’ve written here over the past 3-1/2 months have been true to that aspiration.

But this one? Maybe not so much.

The fact of the matter is that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political stunt last week—flying more than 50 migrants (most of them asylum-seekers on the run from the economically disastrous dictatorship in Venezuela) to Martha’s Vineyard without prior warning to authorities on the island—has pissed me off more than anything that’s happened politically since Donald Trump left the White House.

Sources of Animus

I’ve been trying for days to figure out why. What was it about this act that infuriated me so much? Unlike documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, I don’t think DeSantis’ act is a prelude to a new Holocaust. Given the ordeal so many migrants go through trying to reach the southern border of the United States, and sometimes after they gain entry, it wasn’t even especially cruel. Martha’s Vineyard is a beautiful place, it’s not the dead of winter (when the island off the coast of Massachusetts would be bitterly cold), and it seems the migrants have so far been treated well. Hopefully that will continue, now that they have been transferred by the national guard to a Coast Guard base on nearby Cape Cod.

So why am I nonetheless irate about this whole episode? There are, I think, several reasons.

First and foremost, because the act itself was transparently designed to advance DeSantis’ political ambitions by using several dozen human beings as props. Purely in moral terms, that’s pretty vile. But so is what the stunt tells us about the kind of politics now practiced on the populist right. DeSantis had a single goal here: to shore up support ahead of the 2024 Republican primaries among the kind of jerks who get off on trolling liberals like me and relish treating immigrants like bags of trash you might be tempted to dump on the street outside the home of your greatest enemy.

That’s it. No policy goal was advanced, or could plausibly have been advanced, by the gesture. All it accomplished was to get DeSantis fawning attention from right-leaning media outlets while giving people a fresh occasion to scream at each other on Twitter and cable news programs.

DeSantis’ “Serious” Intent

I consider this so blatantly obvious that I ended up being made even angrier by the credulousness of smart and well-meaning right-leaning friends of mine who insisted in the aftermath of the stunt that DeSantis actually intended to make a serious policy point by sending two planeloads of migrants to an island in the Atlantic Ocean with fewer than 20,000 year-round residents.

This defense of DeSantis begins by saying the point was to expose hypocrisy among Democrats who favor extremely liberal immigration policies while insulating themselves from the consequences of such policies by living in wealthy enclaves far from the places where newcomers settle.

The obvious response to this accusation is to point out that plenty of blue states have large populations of immigrants. The country’s supreme progressive metropolis, New York City, with a total population of 8.4 million, is home to 3.1 million immigrants. Deep-blue California has more immigrants than any other state—11 million out of a total population of 39 million. Even super-liberal Massachusetts itself has a foreign-born population of 1.2 million, or roughly 17 percent of the state’s total of just under 7 million. As of 2018, Florida’s foreign-born population was 21 percent. That’s certainly more than Massachusetts. But a four percentage-point difference is hardly the stuff of a master-level troll—or a horrifying example of hypocrisy.

But, say the special-pleaders, that isn’t true about Martha’s Vineyard, which is an elite playground for rich, sanctimonious progressives like former president Barack Obama. And within a day or so they ended up shipping out the migrants DeSantis sent their way. That’s what made his gesture so clever and effective: It showed that liberals only want immigrants around if they can be moved out of sight and made someone else’s problem.

Hmm. Let’s think this through. For Democrats to avoid a charge of hypocrisy, it’s apparently not enough for blue states to welcome large numbers of immigrants, which they do. Now every town, neighborhood, and even sparsely populated island in a Democratic-leaning state needs to invite them in to stay, even if, as in the case of Martha’s Vineyard, there are no preexisting immigrant communities or suitable jobs there for them. I wonder: Is there any lower bound to this requirement? Must every liberal household in blue states offer spare rooms to migrants in order to demonstrate that Democrats aren’t hypocrites?

Judging by the actions of DeSantis’ partner in Republican trolling, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the answer is apparently Yes. Why else would Abbott have sent several busloads of migrants to be deposited outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington D.C. over the past week? (Remember what I said above about treating immigrants like bags of trash?) It seems we’re supposed to view Harris’ failure to invite them to live with her at the Naval Observatory as an indication that Democrats are dishonest virtue signalers who couldn’t care less about helping migrants.

I’m sorry, my center-right friends, but you’re being played. It’s true that immigration policy in this country is a complete mess. It’s true that the southern border has frequently been overwhelmed in recent years and that this is unsustainable. It’s true that the Biden administration has been paralyzed in responding to the problem because of deep division within the Democratic Party over immigration—just as Congress as a whole has been paralyzed since at least the early 2010s by similar deep divisions in the electorate as a whole.

All of it is bad. The way forward is far from clear. But what’s abundantly clear is that a couple of ambitious and mean-spirited Republican governors using migrants to give Democrats the finger and inspire high fives among the most anti-immigrant faction of the GOP base is only going to make things worse. That’s the way it will always be when politics gets reduced to the performance of practical jokes on political enemies. It’s guaranteed to result in more anger, greater polarization, and less commitment to finding a way forward on the policies that divide us, very much including on immigration.  

The Politics of the Gutter

And that, I think, is the biggest reason why I was so infuriated by the DeSantis stunt: It was the purest example I’ve seen in a while of the kind of bad-faith politics that has proliferated on the right since Trump took over the GOP. DeSantis saw an opportunity to further his own political ambitions by injecting a fresh dose of toxicity into our politics, and he took it. He couldn’t care less about solving the underlying problem. Indeed, solving the problem would deprive Republicans of an issue they think helps them at the ballot box. (But does it?) That gives them an incentive to intensify the acrimony around immigration policy, which is exactly what DeSantis has accomplished.

As long as Republicans act on the conviction that they benefit from driving the country’s politics ever deeper into depravity and dysfunction, the country will continue to be pulled down into the gutter with them.