The images and realities of the DeSantis campaign | Editorial

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Almost three years later — better late than never — Gov. Ron DeSantis finally admitted the obvious about the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump lost, and “Joe Biden’s the president,” DeSantis said outright in an NBC News interview, three days after calling Trump’s stolen election claims “unsubstantiated.”

Until then, he’d been desperately trying to have it both ways in his challenge to Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

He didn’t want to offend the GOP faithful, some 70% of whom still tell pollsters that they deny or doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. So DeSantis avoided direct answers to the question, saying only that it was time to move on.

But by trying, or so it seemed, to be more like Trump than Trump himself, his poll numbers were sinking.

The double-downer

DeSantis doubled down on migrants seeking asylum, targeted LBGTQ minorities, proclaimed a head-scratching war on “woke,” defended his education department for trying to indoctrinate Florida children with the fiction that slavery was beneficial for some slaves, and denounced the Justice Department for Trump’s indictments.

DeSantis even promised to “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in office, as if to top Trump’s command to his White House staff to “bust some heads” of Black Lives Matter demonstrators across the street.

It is reasonable to assume that “slitting throats” was a figure of speech, a DeSantis metaphor for axing jobs, but there are people who take such metaphors literally.

There’s so much actual violence and hate speech in contemporary society, fueled by an internet where such verbal violence is a discordant bell that can never be unrung, that no public figure should ever speak in such a way.

It was, moreover, far beneath the dignity one would expect of a Florida governor — or of any candidate for the presidency.

The power of metaphors, images

Metaphors are like images in that they can be more destructive than any thousand-word essay.

Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign in 1988 was tanked by a tank — actually, by a picture and film clips of a 68-ton M1 Abrams battle tank with a helmeted Dukakis standing in an open hatch. It didn’t fit anything voters knew about Dukakis, whose political focus was on domestic issues.

DeSantis has problems with images, too.

First, there was a social media post by one of his staffers of an utterly weird attack on Trump that was both homophobic and homoerotic in its content. Then another social post superimposed DeSantis’ face over images of marching soldiers and an ancient symbol known as a Sonnenrad that was adopted by Hitler’s Nazis and is popular among American white supremacists today. The words “Make America Florida,” DeSantis’ campaign theme, were superimposed.

The campaign tried to pass off both instances as reposts of videos created by outsiders until it came out that campaign staffers had actually made them. Both staffers were let go, but it was ostensibly only to trim a bloated payroll.

The world is still waiting to hear DeSantis himself denounce the videos for the hatreds they evoked.

Those are the consequences of relying on far-right networks to staff one’s campaign — or, potentially, a presidency. There’s no shortage of responsible conservatives DeSantis could employ, if he were interested and willing to take their advice.

Still not too late, but close

So, three-and-a-half years later, he has come around to where he should have been all along on the 2020 election. It’s not too late to make the rest of his campaign more responsible and preserve his potential for a better one in 2028.

People hoping for better from DeSantis would like to hear him forthrightly denounce Nazism, which is festering dangerously in the United States. But they didn’t hear it when Nazis bearing DeSantis flags along with swastikas showed up to some of his rallies, and they’re not hearing it now.

That doesn’t make him a Nazi. But it is cause for wonder at what he would do to avoid losing their votes to Trump, who probably still has them anyway.

The words of British philosopher John Stuart Mill bear repeating: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.