May30

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

We Have Entered the Blather-for-Blather's-Sake Part of the Presidential Cycle

At the moment, and possibly for the next year, the main competition in the presidential race is between Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Donald Trump. There are already a bunch of thought pieces out there asking "Is Marianne Williamson for real?" and "Could RFK make a race of this thing?" These are a waste of ink and pixels. Joe Biden has a commanding lead, and if he falters in a meaningful way, then a real Democrat (or two, or three) will jump in. Think Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI). Meanwhile, we have yet to see anything that persuades us that the other Republicans who are "running for president" have any chance of breaking through. No, the main (and only) story right now is definitely DeSantis vs. Trump.

In view of this, not to mention that these are kinda the dog days of the political calendar, these two men are sucking up vast amounts of oxygen right now with various pronouncements designed to capture headlines and to show the Republican base who is truly the most right-wing/anti-woke/angry/proto-fascist/able to "own the libs"/etc. Some examples from just this (long) weekend:

• DeSantis decreed that if he is the Republican nominee, "I will beat Biden and I will serve two terms and I will be able to destroy leftism in this country..."
  
  
• Trump went onto his boutique social media platform to acknowledge Memorial Day, sending his best wishes to: "those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the country they love, and to those in line of a very different, but equally dangerous fire, stopping the threats of the terrorists, misfits and lunatic thugs who are working feverishly from within to overturn and destroy our once great country, which has never been in greater peril than it is right now. We must stop the communists, Marxists and fascist 'pigs' at every turn and, Make America Great Again!"
  
  The actual post was in ALL CAPS, but it's nominally more readable this way. And nominally less crazy. But only nominally.
  
  
• DeSantis slammed the debt-ceiling deal, and warned that the U.S. is "careening toward bankruptcy." Since we have been told so very many times that the Governor is very smart, we assume he knows this is a lie, that the U.S. is not capable of going bankrupt, and that even if it was, it's not within a country mile of actually doing so. It's also worth noting that when DeSantis was in Congress, he voted to increase the debt ceiling multiple times.
  
  
• Trump flip-flopped on DeSantis vs. Disney, and announced that the Governor should actually have done more to keep Disney from going "woke." Trump's previous stance, and undoubtedly his future stance one of these days, is that DeSantis went too far and cost his state money and jobs.

None of this matters one bit. These two men don't believe most of the outrageous things they say; they're just trying to figure out what they can say that will rile up people the most, and that will win them today's "I owned the libs" crown. The fact is that 99.99% of it will be forgotten by the time people start casting ballots next year. Heck, 99.99% of it will be forgotten within the week.

The real takeaway here, such as it is, is that the deplatforming of Donald Trump has had virtually no effect. The various media members have clearly signed up for Truth Social accounts, and are following the former president, and are reporting on his every ridiculous utterance, just like they did in 2015-16. The Donald got himself hundreds of millions of dollars, or perhaps billions of dollars, in free publicity, and he's doing it again.

For our part, we're going to turn our right-wing-presidential-candidate-BS filters up to 11 (since it's one more than 10, of course). The great majority of things that the two wannabe presidents say in the next 6-12 months are simply not worthy of notice, with relatively few exceptions (when DeSantis finally starts attacking Trump directly, for example, or if Trump says something that undermines one or more of his legal situations). That said, one of these two is likely to be the Republican nominee for president, so we will keep a close eye on them and report on it when one of them does or says something that could be important later on. (Z)