(Dobbs) Two Clown Shows, From Two Presidential Wannabes
Are these guys really ready for prime time (again)?
So the two presumptive frontrunners in the Republican race to the White House just gave us a progress report.
Or maybe “progress” is the wrong word.
First, there’s Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Yesterday he made his candidacy official. In an undisguised stab at ex-president and wannabe-future-president Donald Trump, he said “We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years.” Make no mistake, after the 2020 presidential election, which was a disaster for the GOP, then the 2022 statehouse and congressional elections, which were another disaster in many places where the GOP should have won (we’re looking at you, Dr. Oz, and at you, Herschel Walker, and at you, Keri Lake), the captain of that culture of losing is Trump. For good measure, in case we still didn’t know who he was talking about, DeSantis added, “Governing is not entertainment.”
The trouble is, for more than 20 minutes, no one heard DeSantis. He had made a deal with his richest backer, Elon Musk, to do his presidential announcement on Musk’s toy called Twitter Spaces, a platform to stream audio, with Musk as moderator.
But to his enormous embarrassment, DeSantis couldn’t deliver and neither could Musk. For the first 20+ minutes, technical glitches and periods of dead air made it virtually impossible to hear the stream. Maybe it’s true as DeSantis’s campaign claims that 650,000 people had tuned in to hear DeSantis say he was running, but by the time anyone could actually hear him say it, the number was down to 250,000. This is how it all turned out for a candidate who crows about his competence.
Of course the governor, who has an excuse for everything, had a ready excuse for the sloppy snafu: he said he “broke the internet.” But he also broke the invincibility of his pal Elon Musk. The New York Times reported that Twitter employees said no one had prepared for “site reliability issues.” Maybe after firing a full three-quarters of Twitter’s workforce after he bought it, Musk needs to hire a few of them back.
Then there’s Florida retiree and courtroom habitué Donald Trump. It came as no surprise to anyone on the planet that when DeSantis suffered his cringeworthy campaign launch— maybe the worst in presidential history— Trump danced on his grave. But Trump’s dance was more bizarre than Elaine Benes’s when she occasionally danced on Seinfeld.
Take a look at what the ex-president wrote on his untruthfully named Truth Social website.
I have to ask, with friends like Kim Jong Un, who needs enemies?
But that buries the bigger points here. For starters, while Trump surely knows the first name of his own state’s governor, he is so sloppy that he misspelled it and evidently couldn’t even bother to proofread his one crudely constructed sentence with a total of 142 characters. He’d have had more space to rant on Twitter.
For seconds, what’s with his burning desire to reignite his brief bromance with Kim Jong Un? Don’t forget, this is the guy who keeps lobbing long-range ballistic missiles through the airspace of our friend and ally Japan. This is the guy who had both his uncle and his half-brother executed when they seemed to threaten his leadership.
I’ve read that Donald Trump doesn’t drink and doesn’t do drugs but you have to wonder, what is wrong with the guy? Joe Biden flies off to meet with world leaders in Japan, then flies home to negotiate the next day to try to end the debt ceiling crisis, but all Trump can call him is a “low-energy individual.” Yet Trump doesn’t have the energy to turn out a single coherent sentence, let alone a single coherent thought that would inspire confidence that he’s fit to serve a second term.
By the way, there are other reasons to be scared of both these extreme Republicans who aspire to lead our nation.
Judging from his performance in Florida’s statehouse, Ron DeSantis would be the most right-wing president in modern American history.
He would ban books not to his liking as he has done in Florida, he would reduce the rights of racial and social minorities and of women as he has done in Florida, and would make boneheaded decisions like the one he made, despite his contention that he’s “pro-business,” to start a blood feud with Florida’s biggest employer and biggest draw, Disney. He even vowed in a radio interview yesterday that if he becomes president, he will think about a pardon for any federal charges brought against Donald Trump. He has become, in short, an extremist of the worst kind.
And Donald Trump? Judging from his performance in the White House and after he left, he would be the most dishonest, dangerous, undemocratic, unscrupulous president in maybe all of American history. Even more than he was the first time. You already know the details.
There are other declared candidates for the Republican nomination: South Carolina’s former governor Nikki Haley, the same state’s junior senator Tim Scott, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, and a wealthy venture capitalist named Vivek Ramaswamy who, if it’s even possible, lands to the right of DeSantis and Trump, and others. Mike Pence is waiting in the wings.
Although none of them would be the president I’d want, most are at least morally fit for the White House in ways that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis is. And none can be dismissed. I covered enough presidential campaigns over the years to have seen that the winner of the nomination sometimes comes out of nowhere— in my experience, Jimmy Carter is the best example. Bill Clinton is a close second.
And big names have been known to fizzle out. Remember Jeb Bush? Remember Scott Walker? Remember Jerry Brown? Remember Howard Dean?
When it comes to presidential politics, nothing is written in stone. All we can hope is, despite all the attention they attract right now, that goes for Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump too. If we didn’t already know it, yesterday proved a point: they both are flawed. Deeply.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Very few truly bright people these days, would want to be President. So, we end up with the shards and ego driven human malware of humanity to fill the position. I'm ashamed that musk has thrown in with that crowd.
Well said Greg.
I think all these guys have scrambled eggs for brains ( though Musk at least has a record of achievement).