DeSantis Doesn’t Have to Be the Nominee, but He Must Be Viable – The American Spectator

I floated an idea about the relative value of having Ron DeSantis in the GOP presidential race in a Facebook post a little over a week ago, and for whatever reason it was one of the few things I’ve put on that platform that hasn’t been suppressed in the past several months. To give you an indication of just how off-the-deep-end Facebook is, it is threatening to cancel the Facebook page for my site the Hayride unless I’m removed as an admin.

Why? Because we had a post at the site about an idiotic Bubba Wallace/hangman’s noose lawsuit that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed against ExxonMobil because on a handful of occasions contractors working on scaffolds at its Baton Rouge oil refinery have hung pull-ropes with slip knots on their lower ends in order to pull tools and equipment up the scaffolds, and a few special snowflakes with not-impressive IQs thought those were hangman’s nooses meant to intimidate black people at the refinery.

The image atop that post was a diagram of how to tie a slip knot. And Facebook somehow interpreted that image as an exhortation to suicide and proceeded to put the Hayride, and me, on double-secret probation.

So while I have a full complement of Facebook friends, and several thousand followers besides, people ping me all the time about how they never see me posting there. And this is why.

But this post about DeSantis got a whole bunch of responses. Somehow it got around. And here’s what it said:

Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting that you have to vote for DeSantis. I’m simply advocating for the positive properties of having DeSantis around as at least a second option in this presidential race on the Republican side.

And I’m a Vivek Ramaswamy fan. I’ve loved most of what Ramaswamy has said on the campaign trail. Ramaswamy has actually outperformed DeSantis so far, though that’s easy to do because he isn’t bearing the weight of any expectations. But right now he’s not a real candidate for president; he’s more of a free agent who can be plugged in to a number of roles (Cabinet, Senate candidate, even VP) and/or put on the watch list for future cycles. He’s this year’s Herman Cain.

And I really liked Herman Cain.

But none of the non–Donald Trump candidates are in DeSantis’ class in terms of having a record of conservative achievement in a meaningful political role. Just this week, for example, DeSantis sacked the Soros-backed state attorney in Orlando for refusing to do her job to prosecute criminals. He governs the way the movement that supports Trump has begged Republicans to govern for decades, and he’s proving that it works, yet we’re being told that he’s an “establishment” politician.

Even if you’re not going to vote for DeSantis — and right now I don’t know that I will; I’ve voted for Trump twice and I can do it again — you have to recognize how dumb a charge that is.

Last weekend DeSantis was in New Hampshire doing a town hall event, and he got question after question from hostile Democrat voters (why are these people at Republican town halls?). His responses were exactly what you want out of a GOP candidate — he gave unapologetic conservative answers and didn’t give a damn whether it irritated the lefty snowflake questioners. One woman in particular said that she was Jewish and had relatives in South Florida, and then she proceeded to blame DeSantis for what she said were his supporters mounting anti-Semitic attacks that frightened said relatives, and he shut her down with a shock-and-awe fusillade of everything proving he’s no anti-Semite:

? MUST WATCH: @RonDeSantis‘ FULL New Hampshire town hall with @WMUR9. pic.twitter.com/mAXb2QAFRx

— Team DeSantis (@TeamDeSantis) August 5, 2023

Again, you don’t have to vote for this guy. And for all of the good moments he does have in interviews and appearances on TV and radio, it’s fair to note that this has been an underwhelming campaign. In between firing Soros attorney’s on his day job, DeSantis also just let his campaign manager go as he tries another reset.

What I’ve said is that contrary to the claims of his detractors — who are typically Trump loyalists (and I don’t blame them for putting the narrative out there) — it isn’t that DeSantis’ campaign is incompetent or poorly run. Maybe it is, but that’s not the reason he’s so far behind Trump in the polls.

The real reason is that the market for a non-Trump populist conservative in the 2024 GOP primaries has dried up. The indictments and the lawfare harassments of Trump have — in the eyes of the bulk of the party’s voters — as a historic injustice and a political atrocity that transcend the usual block-and-tackle of a party primary, installed Trump as the standard bearer for Americans being victimized and persecuted by an out-of-control, failed regime that increasingly appears to have stolen power and mounted a massive coverup to protect its secrets.

Or didn’t you hear about what happened in Michigan just now?

When a growing majority of Republican voters are convinced that the 2020 election was stolen by a political machine that has installed a bribe-taking traitor who can barely utter complete sentences and is actively engaged in suppressing the economic survival of regular Americans, and that the theft was cemented by a Reichstag Fire–esque sabotage of a legitimate protest on Jan. 6, and that the same machine is pulling out all the stops to deny the man whose reelection was stolen in 2020 even the opportunity to stand for redemption in front of the voters, that’s simply a bigger narrative than anything Ron DeSantis could ever conjure up.

Many pundits have noted that the machine, with its indictments of Trump and the nonstop media attention given to him, is doing everything it can to fix him atop the GOP primary totem pole and to freeze out the other candidates, including DeSantis, because the Left believes that Trump can’t win.

The pundits might be right. The Left might be right. Or Trump might exceed expectations again.

My point is that you’d better have a backup plan.

I can’t say that Trump will be in prison this time next year. I can say that Jack Smith and the loons in New York and Atlanta prosecuting him on state charges would dearly love to put him there, and I can say that you should have severe doubts as to whether a Republican political figure of any note can get a fair trial in New York or Washington, D.C. — and perhaps not in Fulton County, Georgia, either.

You would hope and perhaps expect that the Supreme Court would step in and put a stop to this before it becomes such a boiling-kettle event that the 2024 election doesn’t even happen. But is placing all of your eggs in the Supreme Court’s basket smart? The Biden regime won’t even give the justices adequate security while their votaries plot assassinations (hell, they won’t even give RFK Jr. Secret Service protection despite the fact he’s (1) a major presidential candidate and (2) the son and nephew of two politicians who were assassinated), and who knows what could happen? (RELATED: There Is Another Kennedy on the Horizon)

And while in third world countries it’s not unheard of for an imprisoned political candidate to win election, this isn’t a third world country. Not yet. Not in the eyes of our citizens. So it’s a real problem.

What else is a real problem is that Trump is spending more money defending against these criminal cases than he’s raising right now.

I’m not debating the fairness of any of this. Unfair is not an adequate word to describe it. Atrocious is better. I won’t even say what the just outcome for its perpetrators should be, for fear of frightening the fainthearted. Because everything the Biden regime, Jack Smith, and those local slimeball prosecutors are doing to a former president is redolent of a post-republic, third world America, and in the post-republic there are no rules or norms — and “social justice” takes on a totally different meaning.

They ought to beware the wages of their sins.

They have released the whirlwind, and they will pay the price. They won’t know what hit them if they go forward with these awful decisions.

The problem is that such accountability can’t be had, not within the bounds of civilization, unless we install someone in power willing to provide it. And that means getting rid of the Biden regime in the 2024 election.

I won’t say what others are saying. I won’t say that Trump isn’t capable of winning. I see polling that indicates he can. There was an alarming ABC News poll last week that had Trump all the way down at a 30 percent approval rating, which would indicate he’s borderline hopeless as a presidential candidate.

But the same poll had Biden at 33 percent.

Of course, I don’t assume Joe Biden will be the Democrats’ nominee. In fact, I would bet against it. As demented and decrepit as Biden…