“For years, the default conservative place has been to restrict authorities after which get out of the way in which,” DeSantis writes. Such reticence about utilizing the ability of presidency to combat again in opposition to the arrayed forces of the left — together with Fb, Disney, the federal government, the faculties, the media and far else — means “basically greenlighting these establishments to proceed their unimpeded march by way of society.”
My colleague Carlos Lozada traced most of the critiques of Trump which are threaded by way of DeSantis’s e-book, however to his checklist I’d add another: DeSantis is saying that Trump, for all his complaints concerning the “deep state,” shied away from absolutely utilizing the ability of his workplace to destroy the threatening forces of the left. And DeSantis is making an attempt to point out, in vignette after vignette, that he has each the need and the self-discipline to do what Trump didn’t. (That Trump is now beneath federal indictment for, amongst different issues, conserving packing containers with categorized paperwork piled in an ornate lavatory and scattered throughout a storage room flooring at Mar-a-Lago, helps DeSantis’s case.)
Trump typically seems in DeSantis’s e-book as a faintly comedian determine. When DeSantis requests federal help after Hurricane Michael devastated the Panhandle, Trump says, in keeping with DeSantis’s recounting, “They love me within the Panhandle. I will need to have received 90 p.c of the vote on the market. Large crowds. What do they want?” It’s left to Trump’s chief of workers, Mick Mulvaney, to beg DeSantis to delay asserting the help as a result of Trump “doesn’t even know what he agreed to.”
The Trump that emerges in DeSantis’s anecdotes is overmatched by the small print and trivialities of presidency. That’s clearest in DeSantis’s in depth account of his Covid governance, during which he marinates within the particulars of his response and his choices whereas battering away at Dr. Fauci because the personification of biomedical Leviathan. As Lozada observes, that is DeSantis criticizing Trump by proxy — Dr. Fauci served beneath Trump, and DeSantis is making clear he would have by no means let that stand. The critique of Trump just isn’t a lot that he agreed with Dr. Fauci as that he didn’t care sufficient to determine the place he disagreed with him and how one can bend the state to his will.
And so DeSantis delights in describing the methodical, relentless effort he put in to bending the state of Florida to his will. He describes successful Florida’s governorship and ordering his transition workforce to “amass an exhaustive checklist of all of the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor.” A lot of the remainder of the e-book is an exhaustive, and at instances exhausting, account of how he used them.
