I’m sure someone would say something, but if Trump himself was not blaming his illness on someone else (which he indeed might do!), then I’m not sure such a CT would have much in the way of legs.
Have you been around for the last seven years? Baseless conspiracy theories with actual, perceptible consequences are doing very well. “Trump gives interview from hospital bed following heart attack; expresses gratitude for medical case.” Of course they made him say that before the Obamacare death panels got him!
Conspiracy theorists are expert at moving goalposts, and frequently accept different and even contradictory details in service of the deeper story (which is always a variant on THEY are keeping something significant from us).
More to the point of the thread, I think several posters are significantly inflating the importance of debates. There are on the order of hundreds of millions of American votes who pay little or no attention to the presidential horse race until it’s down to the final two. Should DeSantis clear the primary hurdles, he only has to defeat Biden (or whoever).
Trump is better at working a crowd, or he was in 2016, but have you heard him speak recently? I don’t think he can outdo DeSantis on the stage of a debate. It looks like 2024 for the Republican candidates is Iowa and New Hampshire in January, which are both small and heavily engaged states, but then the next thing is Super Tuesday in early March, which looks like it’s at least 13 states this time, including California, Virginia, and North Carolina. I don’t know that Trump has the wherewithal for the kind of ground game it would take to do well in all those places on Super Tuesday. DeSantis, on the other hand, might, even if he’s a lukewarm performer.
I think showing dominance and being the alpha dawg is very important to the Trumpist base. Trump dominated the field–wiped the floor with them. If DeSantis seems weak compared to the other candidates, his own-the-libs antics might not be enough. Further, the stronger he seems in the primary, the better he will do in the general, ceteris paribus; the weaker, the worse.
Doing this wins over the base but doesn’t help in the general with “independents.” And it will probably hurt DeSantis more than it did Trump in 2016 while helping him less because:
- DeSantis isn’t Trump. He can’t necessarily get away with the same kind of things.
- We’ve learned to talk about this fascist nonsense more effectively, and people know what it’s about and can categorize it. I.e., there won’t be the surprise factor there was in 2016, when the media simply didn’t know how to respond to Trump’s outrageousness.
- Until he became president, Trump’s shit was all verbal, whereas DeSantis is owning the libs with actual policies and actions that are hurting people. Trump was able to spin away mere words, which probably to a considerable extent mollified “independents,” but DeSantis is going to have to defend some pretty awful shit.
- OTOH, DeSantis is quite poor at owning the libs with words. I can’t think of a clever or funny thing he ever said. Thus, while engaged in his campaign, he can’t generate new outrage and pump up the base as Trump could.
Yeah, but dying of cancer over the course of months, maybe a year or more? I’m not feeling it as a major CT possibility. But I could be wrong!
If DeSantis is being sold as the next big Trumpist badass (which indeed seems to be happening), I think more people in the base will tune into the debates to see him kick ass or at least read about them later. Even if they don’t, the media horse race shit gets into one’s head regardless.
He doesn’t need to do much more than put the other candidates down and show dominance. I would agree that he is not as good as this as he used to be, but DeSantis has not shown himself capable of “pwning the RINO cucks” at all.
I agree that DeSantis’s youth, health, and energy are big advantageous over Trump.
I don’t think this is about whether DeSantis can beat Trump, he probably can, it’s about whether he can win after beating Trump.
…this matters much less than you think. Because everything is filtered now through a layer of disinformation, media talking heads, talking points and echo chambers. DeSantis is weak as a confident public speaker. He would look weak against many other Republican candidates. But how is he portrayed in the mainstream press?
“DeSantis Takes on the Education Establishment, and Builds his Brand.”
" DeSantis Takes Aim at Wall Street After Vendetta Against Disney"
The reality is that DeStantis is a dangerous extremist who is implementing authoritarian policies in his home state, and is a bad and not-confident public speaker who would be terrible in debates.
How he is portrayed? A strong leader who took down Disney and is coming after Wall Street and the woke universities. This isn’t from Fox News. The entire modern media machine buys into this crap.
We live in competing realities. It’s a chaotic maelstrom of competing ideals and you can’t play a prediction game when things are constantly in a state of unrest. In no rational world would Trump have even come close to the presidency. But we aren’t living in a rational world.
If Trump died, his Qult will insist that he faked it and will return alongside JFK Jr to throw all the Democrats in jail.
"…will return alongside JFK Jr, JFK Sr., Elvis… oh, and Jimmy Hoffa. "
Not that it matters anymore, and it’s probably not germane to this thread, but this is kinda funny…
And in that picture his wife even looks like she’s trying to be a Disney princess.
She did it! And soon she will be Verywhite Ultrawholesome Superchristian Empress of America!
Republicans don’t need independents to win.
What do DeSantis, Haley, Trump claim as their platform? The Republican Party in 2020 notoriously, for the fist time ever, didn’t create a platform for their party. They proposed no ideas. I wonder if they still have no ideas?
Does DeSantis have ideas? Haley? Trump?
I think the modern Republican party focuses only on the horrors of living in cities. Cities have black and brown people who are dangerous. Whitey, is a hunter and fisher who is petrified about life in the city. Whitey knows that he has to carry his gun in the city, because that’s a dangerous place.
Republicans have no ideas. They are focusing on the fears of white people who don’t live in cities. People who are getting older and, oddly, more dependent on people of color and weirdness.
Every candidate has weaknesses. DeSantis will lose votes over past statements on social security and Medicare. And Democrats can plausibly paint him as a threat to popular abortion rights (although the 15 week Florida limit, by itself, won’t hurt him much).
But on crime and immigration and hot-buttons like reverse discrimination and elementary school sex education, DeSantis takes more popular positions than almost any Democrat. See:
and:
I think Kari Lake thought this in Arizona. Heck, she probably still does, seeing as how she still thinks she won…
I will say this about Ron. I was in Florida directly in the path of Hurricane Ian (and bunkered down during it). He was on TV a lot. And he was pretty good. He is actually competent and does the right things in a crisis. He did not mince words, he said that people needed to take shelter or die. He pretty much did exactly what you’d want a governor to do in that situation. If you want to know how Trump handles such situations, just ask Puerto Rico.
People used to say, for all the evil crap Mussolini did, he kept the trains running. DeSantis seems like that kind of leader.
I would still never vote for him in a million years.
You are correct: they do not have ideas. Technically, however, they just kept the platform from 2016 (my interpretation of the following link), and they blamed the inability of the Platform Committee to meet on Covid:
https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_2020.pdf
"RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including
any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order."
Still, it was a weird thing to do (or not do), and this doc strikes me as odd as well.
And all the evil lib’rul ideas that go with Big Evil City living, like equality for women, POC, and LGBTQ+ people. Plus, drag queens. Lots of drag queens.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been working in Alabama a lot the past three years, and governor Kay Ivey did the kinds of things one would expect a blue state governor to do. There was a stay at home order, a mask mandate, etc. There wasn’t a lot of Sturm und Drang that I noticed, but I never watched local news on TV, so maybe I missed the good stuff.
DeSantis could probably be a good politician if he wanted to be, but, like his master, he wants the wrong things.
I agreed with you up to this point.
DeSantis is not a fascist, and painting him as such will alienate voters genuinely unsure whether to vote for the Democrat or Republican.
If DeSantis is a Mussolini type, what would be his (metaphorical) Ethiopia?
When Trump won, I feared that Mexico would be his Ethiopia. After all that talk about Mexico paying for the wall, I thought he might go to war in an attempt to steal the payment, perhaps by occupying oil fields. But it turned out that even Trump, bad as he is, isn’t a Mussolini.