A Shitshow to Kick off a Bloodbath Primary SZN
This will be a bum fight between two kids with gluesticks lodged inside their nostrils.
On a glitchy, echoing, audio-only livestream, a clammy and flustered Ron DeSantis formally launched his much-anticipated presidential campaign. The beleaguered and maligned announcement arrived via Twitter Spaces, a dark corner of the internet solely occupied by men who still have NFTs as their profile pic. Ron DeSantis is the culture war hero no one asked for, and his alleged widespread popularity in Florida scans as a backhanded compliment. Republican Party politics has been a matter of descending and descending again, and I shouldn’t have to tell you that the role of GOP standard-bearer in the lord’s year 2023 is a stupid and disgusting job—one in which only someone who is facile and shameless could flourish to the extent that Donald Trump has. DeSantis has inserted himself as a tone-setting supporting character in a primary showdown that will soon be gratuitously saturated with a goof crew of swirly-eyed dead-enders.
DeSantis is billed as a polished autocrat who can competently legislate every anti-human instinct in American politics, a viable “alternative” for a party increasingly flooded with uncut Chan-board bigotry/conspiracy bullshit and reactionary fantasies. The protagonists in this deranged and deranging subplot of American Democaplyse have been a disgusting and depraved game show host and a pretend blood-and-soil fascist who, until a few weeks ago, howled and leered and seethed on camera in a way that made him the perfect star for a network whose business model is leveraged on an ambitious gambit to replace the outside world with a substitute reality that is infinitely worse.
“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism,” DeSantis said on Fox News Wednesday night. It is strange enough to watch a current-day 44-year-old adult—let alone a presidential aspirant—acting scandalized and indignant and affronted over the unbearable horror of a “woke mind virus.” It is even more strange to see DeSantis wanly aping this tired provocateur schtick because he is the kind of 44-year-old that existed in 1950. The same goes for the ongoing effort to sell this dusty loathsomeness as somehow transgressive and countercultural. This reveals how value-neutral conservatives actually are, mostly since the boldest worldview they can conceive of is that of a dull suburban bigot. Trump’s most formidable adversary is an anti-charismatic nullity who lags 27 points behind in recent polling. His campaign brand is built to appeal to sexless and terminally online psychopaths who refuse to suspend disbelief over the possibility of a Black Little Mermaid while uncritically accepting the existence of a talking crab.
The point of right-wing political media is to be gleefully dismissive of the empirical and observable reality of systemic racism and how unfettered capitalism is distorting and undermining democracy. It is infuriating and bleakly hilarious to see beguiled centrist doofuses try to stake a moderate position on the question of whether the Republican Party is in the complete thrall of Trumpism. As elected Republican vampires, clowns, and demons follow their leader into strident kookery and clammy influencer-style grifting, a priestly caste of soft-brained pundits cling to this desperate and delusional belief that there is a competing alternative to the reprobate bottom-feeders thirstily vying to claim Trump’s soggy mantle.
Trump’s signature legislative achievements during his disgraced and bottomed-out presidency were within the acceptable bounds of Koch-funded and Federalist Society orthodoxy. This isn’t as much an exoneration of the Cheeto in the White House!! as it is a condemnation of the Republican Party. In his atavistic sadism and greed, Trump represents more of an apotheosis than a reckoning. The pettifogging contrasts between Trump and the party he has co-opted mostly lie in degrees of subtext and a brazen hostility toward democratic norms. This is a distinction without difference. Any other marginal variance has been displaced by a clownish pseudo-ideology and the professional sycophants who will dutifully infect a sizable portion of the electorate with this virulent strain of annihilating aggrievement.
After four years in power, Trump is, characteristically and axiomatically, unchanged; meanwhile, the Republicans have dispensed with their smarm and euphemisms. For a political movement so grounded in both dealing out and taking offense, it is oddly fitting that Americans living in a hermetically sealed zone of denial will post about how they wish for a viable presidential candidate to advocate for a compassionate and altruistic Republican Party, and for that appeal to be so engaging that it would compel voters to their better natures. In reality, that candidate would be considered a cuck and would lose a Congressional primary to a mentally ill jetski dealer.
For all of Trump’s free-jazz bluster about “making America great again” and DeSantis’s preening and priggish rhetoric about the “great American comeback,” they are both creatures of a political project that is transparently about keeping this tenuous and untenable present from tipping into any kind of future. It is about maintaining control, whatever that means and at whatever cost, and a nation too confused and too hapless to tell them no.
The forthcoming Republican debates will be a rubbernecking bloodbath that will be impossible to not take some perverse amusement in. One man is a slave to vanity shoved haphazardly into an expensive suit, a perfect avatar of every rancid revanchist American impulse that made his celebrity and ultimately his presidency possible. The other is a flailing and flabby facsimile. In a fit of spite and sudden blistering sadism, Trump will call DeSantis’s wife a sick dog and demand that she be put down, while the Florida Governor will claim that he filed for divorce because his Disney World marriage was doomed to be destroyed by woke madness. An audience of vengeful and embittered cranks will hoot and cackle. Maybe, possibly, somewhere in small-town Nebraska, an 85-year-old granny will gaze and wonder how either of them will lower gas prices.
