Altercation: Ron DeSantis Is an Honest-to-God Semi-Fascist

One of the problems with accurately describing Donald Trump’s weird brand of fascism is the ridiculousness of the man’s personality in so many other respects. There is nothing more on-brand than Trump ranting, endlessly and incoherently, for a new election, or being the alleged victim of unfair persecution for his own lying on his for-profit social network designed to bilk his own idiotic MAGA fans that is in the process of going broke as it stiffs all its suppliers. (All that is missing are new rape allegations.) It would all be entertaining were it not for the slow-motion destruction of democracy it entails.

There’s nothing entertaining, however, about Ron DeSantis. As Trump’s apparent descent into madness becomes ever more evident to those who’ve tried for years to ignore it, the Republican most likely to win the party’s 2024 presidential nomination rules Florida the way a fascist would, if that fascist were an American politician without access to his own military force who did not (yet) enjoy the power to shut down media he did not like. That won’t be the case should he become president.

Members of the mainstream media have long been wary of applying the term “fascist” to any American politician. They say it is not their job to characterize Republicans; they just “report the news,” even when what they are actually doing is passing along Republican lies and deliberate misinformation. Joe Biden has therefore done them a favor by referring to the ideology of Donald Trump and his followers as “semi-fascism.” The word is now, as journalists say, “in play.” (And by the way, while it may have been off-the-cuff, “semi-fascism” is a good term for employing fascist-like tactics at every available opportunity in a country that has not yet turned its institutions over to a fascist leader.)

Now, take a look at just a few of DeSantis’s recent moves:

He suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren, a twice-elected local official, because he didn’t like the police reforms he initiated. Warren was also among a group of prosecutors who announced, “We decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions.”
He suspended four elected members of the Broward County school board—all registered Democrats—and turned the board over to a majority of Republicans.
He held a press conference to announce the arrest of 20 people—who cast 0.0000018 percent of the 11 million ballots cast in Florida’s 2020 election—for allegedly voting illegally. Many had been informed by state and local officials that they were eligible to vote. He then tried to blame local election officials after they had been informed by the state’s election investigation chief that they faced “no fault” for felons voting after having been told by the appropriate sources that they were entitled to vote. One individual charged with voter fraud was reportedly “arrested at 6 a.m. when a SWAT team banged on his door.”
He signed a law to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.
He signed another law to ban instruction of gender identity and sexual orientation for young children. This included barring Florida public schools from using 54 math textbooks, many of them on the grounds that they allegedly contained “social-emotional learning content” designed to build student confidence, according to a New York Times analysis. This purposely discriminatory law, called the Parental Rights in Education Act, but commonly referred to as the “don’t say gay” law, bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.
He banned mainstream-media reporters from attending the annual Republican Sunshine Summit in Florida, but kept it open to MAGA-friendly “news” outlets.
He used his line-item veto to zero out $35 million in state funds approved by the legislature for a new Tampa Bay Rays training facility after the baseball team publicly spoke out against gun violence through its Twitter account.
He successfully used his veto threat to impose a $27.5 million fine on the Special Olympics in order to prevent it from insisting on a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its (medically vulnerable) athletes.

How does the MSM tend to characterize DeSantis? As Dan Froomkin notes, we tend to get stories like DeSantis “raised his national profile over his handling of the pandemic and is widely considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate” (Wall Street Journal) or “has relished stoking cultural battles, even going to war with Disney, a storied company with deep ties to his state” (New York Times). Do these read like accurate descriptions of the above actions and what they may portend for the future? Charlie Crist “has already made it clear that he intends to make the election a referendum on DeSantis, adopting the slogan ‘Defeat fascism, defeat DeSantis.’” It’s long past time that American journalism caught up.

It’s been hard to keep up with all of Trump’s crimes, together with the crimes committed by his underlings on behalf of these crimes. It would be a shame if Bill Barr retained a shred of the reputation that led so many journalists to foolishly trust him when he lied about the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and helped Trump cover up the crimes related to that investigation. (It’s also a shame that Mueller let him get away with it.) Charlie Savage has a lengthy Twitter thread explaining what Barr did, and Neal Katyal has penned this strong op-ed.

Thing is, this was obvious at the time, but almost all the news coverage of the time credulously took Barr’s lies at face value and allowed Trump and the Trump-friendly media to implant the idea of a “Russia Hoax,” which continues to pervert our politics today. As I wrote in my 2020 book, Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse:

The Mueller Report’s release was initially confused by the fact that Trump’s handpicked attorney general, William Barr, purposely misled the public about its contents before its publication. According to Barr’s false assertions, the report exonerated Trump on virtually all matters. In fact, Mueller’s report laid out at least ten instances in which Trump had attempted to obstruct justice and specified explicitly that it was not “exonerating” him of any of them.

Barr, who appeared to view himself as Trump’s personal attorney and protector rather than the nation’s top law-enforcement official, also claimed that Trump and his advisers had “fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.” This was all false as well. Trump, the report noted, “engaged in efforts” to “prevent the disclosure of evidence to [the special counsel], including through public and private contacts with potential witnesses.”

Then there were the lies from Trump’s associates that the report documented. CNN found what it termed “77 specific instances where President Donald Trump’s campaign staff, administration officials and family members, Republican backers and his associates lied or made false assertions (sometimes unintentionally) to the public.” But it all worked, at least for a while. There ought to be lesson there, alas.

A Personal Note: This past Wednesday, I was forced to stop frantically making improvements, corrections, and additions, etc., and send the final version of my 12th book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, to the printers. (Its pub date is November 22.) Coincidentally, my first one, Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, was published almost exactly 30 years ago this week (with a second, updated version published eight years later) and is apparently available at a criminally low price.

Back in the early 1970s, Loudon Wainwright III was considered by critics to be part of a crop of “New Dylans,” and lumped together with Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Steve Forbert, and some fellow from New Jersey. (You can hear him singing about Dylan and the bard’s other “dumb-ass kid brothers” in this song.) Now, after another 31 albums, he’s released Lifetime Achievement, which is simultaneously a look back and a look forward, particularly at his own mistakes and mortality. This is actually true of most of Wainwright’s 30 previous albums, also of his book, his show about his relationship with his dad, and his concerts as well. I caught one this week at City Winery in which he was joined by the ace musicians Chaim Tannenbaum, David Mansfield, and Suzzy Roche, with whom Loudon shares a daughter and is about to share a grandchild. (Weirdly, he already shares a grandchild, together with an obsession with death, with another “new Dylan”—the late, great Leonard Cohen.) Among the highlights were the two—count ’em, two—songs he sang about his partner (and my friend of four decades), New Yorker editor Susan Morrison. It was, as always with Loudon, a moving affair—one where much of the audience felt like they were part of one of folk music’s most interesting (and dysfunctional) extended families. I caught Roger Waters’s impressively over-the-top extravaganza at the Garden one night later (absent any antisemitism, I should add). It required a crew of 140 people and it showed. But I left Loudon’s show a much happier fellow.

This Just In: Bruce Springsteen and Woody Allen have somehow morphed into the same person. (Sorry, Woody haters.)