Every Republican Is Not Hitler
Democrats will stop at nothing to cast Republicans as as bad or worse than Trump, regardless of whether that is actually true
Democrats and their allies in certain media circles reacted with disgust at Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he will once again run for the Republican Party nomination for President in 2024.
But I don’t buy it for a second.
Donald Trump is crass, brash, narcissistic, and prone to giving soundbites that make reasonable people recoil in disgust, even conservatives. Every time he opens his mouth, issues a press release, or steps in front of a camera, much of the mainstream media lines up like drunks in front of a brewery handing out free beer. They eagerly wait to catch every moment and transcribe every word so that they can turn around and warn America that its Democracy is on the verge of collapse, and that Nazism is on the rise. Fear sells, and there’s no one that makes readers of the New York Times, MSNBC, and Washington Post fear for the future more than Donald Trump.
It’s not just viewers. Democrats know all too well that for each person Trump appeals to with his outlandish statements, two more independent or undecided voters are driven to casting their ballot against him because of those very same statements. He may have won in 2016 by portraying himself as an outsider, but that time is over. In 2020 he was forced to actually run on his own record and he failed to beat a man who barely left his basement during the campaign.
From 2020 until the midterm cycle in 2022 Trump refused focus on any issue apart from his misguided belief that the election was stolen from him. Even when he addressed the economy, crime, or the border, he couched it in terms of his own personal grievances against those who he felt failed to support him in January of 2020 when he attempted to defy the will of the American people. And yet, despite his failure to achieve any tangible political goals or advance conservative policies in any significant way, he remained near the forefront of GOP politics in 2022 by hand-picking several candidates in key swing races across the country.
And, like clockwork, the media and Democrats thanked their lucky stars that the Republicans could be so foolish as to allow Trump to be close to, and to dictate, the campaigns in such important elections. Trump's candidates made it easy on their opponents, openly courting his blessing and amplifying his pet issues at the expense of core conservative causes that their constituents (including independent voters) actually cared about, and that could really hurt Democrats due to Biden's policy failures in those areas.
The strategy was a winning one, as nearly all of Trump’s chosen candidates lost crucial, close races. It was clear evidence of both Trump’s inability to pick quality candidates and the failure of those candidates to run campaigns that voters actually responded to. Democrats and the media had an easy time convincing people that politicians like Kari Lake and Dr. Oz were just as dangerous as Donald Trump and that electing them could lead to the end of this country as a functioning Democracy. It was the same fear-based argument that they’d employed in 2020 and once again it was, for the most part, successful at least where the MAGA candidates were concerned.
But the 2022 election cycle gave a small glimpse into an election strategy that I believe will come to dominate both the Republican Presidential Primary and the 2024 Presidential Election.
Ron Desantis is a good example of this strategy. For most of 2022 Donald Trump remained silent on the subject of DeSantis’ campaign for reelection as Governor of Florida. He did not endorse DeSantis until an offhand comment made in early November, mere days before the election. The feud between the two men became national news and was often written about. And yet, in the runup to the 2022 election, DeSantis’ opponent Charlie Crist and many in the media drew many comparisons between DeSantis and Trump, some even calling him a more dangerous version of the former president.
For his part, DeSantis embraced many of the same political issues as Trump, such as immigration and crime. He also addressed “culture war” issues like parents’ rights and pushing back against “wokeness” and Critical Race Theory.
He has his own ego issues, just like Trump, and his own personal beliefs bleed over into his political decisions. And yet, DeSantis was able to cruise to victory over Crist by a historic margin, even saddled with comparisons to the former president.
The comparisons to Trump completely derailed Oz, Kari Lake, and Tudor Dixon, and yet DeSantis not only survived, but exceeded expectations.
But why?
I believe it is because, for all his faults, Ron DeSantis achieved tangible political victories. Bills were signed into law, school board candidates were elected, all using the Democratic process. While Trump skulked at a luxury resort and focused on an election that has been over for two years and spent time decrying conservative politicians like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell, DeSantis was fully focused on taking the fight to Democrats and their allies on critical issues that voters care about.
And so it was difficult to cast DeSantis as a diabolical Nazi villain on par with Trump because he refused to fall into the same ego-driven traps. He may have an ego on par with Trump, but he is able to argue that his ego was the fire that fueled his drive to reform policy in Florida and enact the will of the voters in key areas. DeSantis may be boastful, but he has real accomplishments to laud, and so conservative voters in Florida and beyond don’t see these boasts as merely vainglorious self-aggrandizement.
You can play a dozen soundbites of Trump calling to grab women by the genitals or legitimizing the imprisonment and rape of reporters who refuse to divulge their sources. DeSantis has some questionable quotes, but they are tame by comparison, and often taken out of context.
He simply does not alienate independent or undecided voters the way Trump did, and continues to do.
And so when the media or Democrats seek to use fear to drive voters away from DeSantis, it will be supremely difficult to accomplish. He won’t make it as easy as Trump, but they simply don’t have any other strategies apart from comparing popular Republican politicians to Hitler or Mussolini. Journalists will rail that DeSantis is going to roll the country back to the Jim Crow era of American society, and while Trump would have taken their bait and called for their arrest or suppression, DeSantis will coolly and calmly point to the immensely popular policies he has enacted in Florida, and how he has taken up the battles that conservatives Americans truly want to see won, for the good not just of one man, but for the entire country.
I think what DeSantis, or any non-Trump Republican presidential candidate will expose the fact that, while never-Trump Conservatives and Democrats say that they opposed Trump for the “good of the country” this was simply a fabrication. They opposed Trump because he was a Republican and they thought his volatile and childish attitudes toward governance would make him easy to beat, and in 2016 they miscalculated.
The truth is that there is no current Republican candidate that the never-Trump Conservatives or Democrats believe is actually fit to even run for office, let alone be elected. In their eyes, everyone is Trump, or worse than Trump, because they need this fear to override voters’ reason, so that they can win. But this simply is not a tenable position. You cannot convince conservative voters that if they vote for any Republican candidates that aren’t Trump, that they are still actively supporting authoritarianism and white supremacy.
It is tantamount to shaming Conservative voters into believing that their only choice is to vote for Joe Biden, or vote for treason and bigotry. This is a false choice, especially where men like DeSantis are concerned, and it’s extremely insulting to Conservative voters who are legitimately concerned with the policy decisions that Biden has made, and the negative effects they have had on this country.
Democrats and the media will try to drag any Republican candidate down to Trump’s level, and Conservative and independent voters will see through this sham for what it is: a cheap ploy to use fear to smear the reputations of any candidates that pose any threat to Democrat control of the White House.
But I am confident that this strategy will backfire because Conservative voters are ready for a post-Trump candidate that has real policy achievements on their record, and the political savvy to run a campaign based on true Conservative values and ethics.
Would you consider subscribing for free to Repubblica as a fellow Conservative