Global Courant 2023-05-31 12:01:17
The conventional wisdom of the media, now hardening into cement, is that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee next year, running against President Biden.
And chances are that will happen. Trump has risen steadily in national polls, accumulating a whopping 40-point lead over Ron DeSantis, while others are stuck in the single digits. This meteoric rise comes despite a criminal charge in the Stormy Daniels case and a $5 million verdict against him in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit — or maybe that has further convinced his loyalists that he’s being prosecuted.
But it’s impossible to ignore the avalanche of bad press that has fallen on DeSantis. Whatever his shortcomings as a candidate, the media’s ongoing attack on the Florida governor feels almost orchestrated.
From the New York Times about his use of secret friends’ private jets to Politico comparing his wife to Lady Macbeth, DeSantis is being hammered by a media institution he openly despises. DeSantis has a “love problem,” says a CNN columnist. He has gone from media favorite to media piñata.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis waves as he arrives at a conference titled “Celebrate the Faces of Israel” at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem on April 27, 2023. (AP/Maya Alleruzzo)
As Andrew Sullivan relates in his Substack column, “Susan Glasser rejoiced that DeSantis was ‘a forty-four-year-old maverick who would be eaten alive.’ Bulwark mucky-muck Charlie Sykes mused, ‘There have certainly been worse cluster campaigns than the one that we saw… but so far no one can remember any.'”
Yes, a newly declared presidential candidate should be aggressively scrutinized by the press. But I sense a changed attitude toward DeSantis that goes beyond our addiction to polls and is closely tied to Trump.
For most in the media, nothing is more important than keeping the former president from an encore. When DeSantis looked like a giant killer, the consensus was high, he’ll knock Donald off and our future national nightmare will never come true.
But with the governor losing traction, in part by letting Trump define him without hitting back, the mood in the media has changed. It’s great if Trump is the nominee, the thinking goes, because he would be the easiest opponent for Biden to beat.
President Biden calls Florida’s ban on gender-affirming medical care “almost sinful” in an interview with “The Daily Show.” (CBS/Paramount Plus/’The Daily Show’/YouTube)
Be careful what you wish for, because in 2016 almost everyone thought Hillary Clinton would waltz into the White House.
Still, DeSantis is a rookie on the national scene. If he wants to be “the anti-woke candidate,” writes Sullivan, “he has to do better than tell us that DEI and SEL and ESG are just as bad as CRT. That is an insane amount of insidery jargon. doing more than simply repeating the word “wake up.” He needs to appeal beyond the GOP base to the moderates and independents who still believe in individual liberty, merit, color-blind race policy, personal responsibility, and raising kids protected from progressive zealots …
“I find myself advocating for him against Trump, not out of affection or great admiration, but simply because I believe Biden is a lot weaker than many Democrats seem to believe, and because my primary goal is to avoid a second Trump term . I fear Biden is fast becoming the Yuri Andropov of the Democratic Party — and can’t really beat Trump next time around.”
It’s not a crazy theory. On Sunday’s “Media Buzz,” in a focus group led by Frank Luntz, while some admired Biden’s track record, Democrats said he was “too old and outdated,” “out of touch,” “sensible but he’s old.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on April 27, 2023 in Manchester, New Hampshire. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
I’m increasingly thinking this poses a more visceral threat to his re-election than I had realized – and imagine him running against a Floridian who is 44.
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There is widespread agreement that DeSantis needs to loosen up and tell his personal story. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist who was a top speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, is in this camp:
“Man, he’s intense… He should play his biography because it’s interesting. Just middle class kid, local baseball, then Yale, Harvard, the US Navy… Kind of a compliment to the country being a child with no special connections got up so high so fast.”
Former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are considered top candidates vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. (Getty Images)
And yet, I bet much of the electorate doesn’t know that DeSantis served in the military during the Iraq War.
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The governor, who went to Iowa yesterday, where a strong performance could be a game-changer, has time to learn how to work the fairground circuit. But the press now seems to have a big chip on its collective shoulder about DeSantis. That helps explain why he generally avoids mainstream outlets, but they would also be a way to get out the story he needs to tell.
Howard Kurtz is the host of FOX News Channel’s MediaBuzz (Sunday 11am-12pm ET). Based in Washington, DC, he joined the network in July 2013 and makes regular appearances Special report with Bret Baier and other programs.
