DePlatformed

The occasion of a not-so-great reset demands that we point some fingers. Who’s to blame for the disappointing start to the governor of Florida’s presidential campaign?

There’s Ron DeSantis, of course, an unlikable politician and an underwhelming presence on the trail. There’s his campaign manager, who may not be long for this political world after spending exorbitantly to little effect. There’s Donald Trump, whose attacks on the governor have been shrewd if shameless. There’s congressional Republicans, few of whom have endorsed DeSantis for fear of earning the wrath of the orange gorilla. And there’s the rest of the Republican presidential field, hard at work in attracting support from anti-Trump Republicans for their no-shot candidacies that would more fruitfully be diverted to the second-place contender.

How about conservative media, though? Do they bear any blame?

They do, Semafor reporter Benjy Sarlin argued in a provocative Twitter thread posted a few days ago. 

“The mainstream media wants Trump” isn’t so much the problem for DeSantis as conservative media not lining up behind him out the gate, which looked like a real possibility at one point. And given risks in antagonizing Trump, it’s harder to galvanize them the stronger Trump looks.

Like we keep hearing from R’s (and even some voters…) that there’s a point Trump’s baggage becomes too much. Okay, but HOW do they reach that conclusion? Which outlet they read/watch/listen to is going to relay it? It doesn’t just “happen”

If I were DeSantis I would be really pissed that it looked like an extremely broad swath of influential party and movement figures were going to join forces and rush Trump at once and then like 95% of them balked like they always do. But it is what it is and you need a plan B.

My respect for Sarlin, my considered contempt for populist right-wing media, and my intense desire for a post-Trump GOP make this what-if awfully attractive.

DeSantis really did have momentum post-midterm. He performed well in an election where Trump’s preferred candidates performed poorly, and it paid off. In the weeks after his reelection landslide, he gained 10 points in national primary polling. Some right-wing media outlets pronounced him “DeFuture.” Influential populists touted him as “Trump but electable,” with world-beating policy chops to boot. It felt like a turning point.

But there have been many such turning points since 2016 and pro-Trump media never turns. Access Hollywood, January 6, multiple criminal indictments—forks in the political road continue to appear with regularity, and remain forever untaken. 

Could the right’s propaganda apparatus have done more to help DeSantis against Trump?

There’s a recurring fantasy hinted at in Sarlin’s thread that if only some critical mass of Republican “thought leaders” united at an opportune moment, launching an insurrection of their own, they might dislodge the king from his throne. It was seen most recently in calls for the Republican field to pile on Trump en masse instead of leaving it to Chris Christie to do their dirty work for them.

You’re not going to shoot King Kong off the top of the Empire State Building by sending one or two planes to attack. He’ll swat them like flies. But send a fleet … 

The “strength in numbers” theory is appealing because it’s been many years since it was tested. The last time a meaningful number of prominent Republicans declared Trump’s leadership of the party unacceptable was after the Access Hollywood tape. Republican voters ignored them, firm in their ruinous conviction that no amount of depravity can render Trump less fit for office than a Democrat.

Not since then has any bloc of “influencers” dared to see what would happen if they joined forces, Avengers-style, against Thanos. Maybe things are different now.

Maybe, but I doubt it. Consider the fact that some very influential influencers are supporting DeSantis over Trump.

Given his perch at The Daily Wire, one could plausibly argue that Ben Shapiro is the most powerful person in right-wing media. Shapiro is Team DeSantis.

He’s done more than just endorse the governor. He’s offered him his megaphone to attack Trump during interviews.

The owner of Twitter is another powerful figure in right-wing media, enough so to have made his platform the home of Tucker Carlson’s new “show.” Elon Musk, the world’s most redpilled mega-billionaire, is also Team DeSantis. And like Shapiro, he’s put his money where his mouth is, providing the governor with a forum to try to reach Republican voters.

Is Joe Rogan a member of right-wing media? His politics are … heterodox (“confused” might be better) but his populist audience is enormous and includes many young Republicans. Rogan is pro-gun, anti-Biden, ambivalent at best about vaccines, and very much Team DeSantis.

If all of that is Too Online, how about the old pros at Fox News and Murdoch media? Their loyalties have come into question of late as the governor’s polling has faltered but until recently they too were Team DeSantis—and not belatedly either. Per one analysis, Fox had DeSantis on 173 times between August 2017 (before he became governor) through May 2021. That’s roughly once a week for four years, all of it predating the hottest stage of the GOP base’s DeSantis-mania.

Go further down the food chain and you’ll find the governor holding his own with Trump in the race to amass the largest social-media army of “influential” post-liberal goblins. Commentators who’ve spent years amassing populist cred by preaching burn-it-all-down Jacobinism have declared that the “cold, calculating, ruthlessly effective RDS” is acceptable as an alternative to Trump as commander-in-chief of the right’s culture war.

As for the activist class, there may be no better-known right-wing operative in 2023 than Christopher Rufo, the man who introduced critical race theory to the conservative masses. Rufo isn’t just Team DeSantis in the primary, he’s gone to work for the governor as a trustee of Florida’ New College tasked with de-woke-ifying the place.

All of this may not qualify as an “extremely broad swath of influential party and movement figures,” as Sarlin put it, but it ain’t nothing. According to Morning Consult, in fact, the ratio of good things to bad things that Republican primary voters are hearing about Ron DeSantis is greater than it is about the soon-to-be-thrice-indicted Donald Trump.

What the governor needed from conservative media influencers at the start of his campaign was a so-called “permission structure” in which populists torn between him and Trump might come to prefer him without feeling that they were betraying the right by doing so. That’s exactly what Shapiro, Musk, Rogan, Fox News, and many more have given them. And it’s worked! The governor is in second place in a party in which no one else has managed to make a dent in Trump’s support since 2016. Loads of Republican voters are DeSantis-curious.

But they’re only curious, not committed. He’s still down 30 points. Why?

There are prosaic reasons that explain why conservative media has failed to move the needle (much) for Team Ron. There are also reasons that we might call “structural.”

One prosaic reason is that COVID politics, DeSantis’ bread and butter, ain’t what it used to be. He made his bones by (mostly) keeping Florida open for business during the pandemic and denouncing lockdowns, hoping to eventually leverage the goodwill he earned against Trump and his deputy Anthony Fauci. But recent data suggests that Republicans are mostly over it.

Six different Republican operatives, campaign officials, and pollsters described or shared with Rolling Stone internal data and surveys they’d conducted or reviewed last and this year. Some of these sources are Trump-aligned, some support DeSantis, and others back different 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls. Across the board in the surveys, Covid-related policy—including vaccines and vaccine mandates—did not rank as an item of high concern for voters. That held true even when voters were specifically given the option of Covid policy when asked about their concerns. Since the middle of last year, Covid-related policy did not show up in conservatives’ top 10, or top 15, issues in any form, leading various campaigns and consultants to declare it, for the most part, unuseful.

A pro-DeSantis conservative media outlet attempting to pump up support for the governor by reminding readers of his record on COVID is apt to find that they’re pumping a dry well. The right has moved on.

Another prosaic explanation for Trump’s polling strength is what they’ve moved on to.

The prospect of multiple criminal indictments seemed like a potent potential turning point for the Republican base, particularly in light of DeSantis’ nearly 20-point reelection win in Florida last fall. Instead of directly questioning Trump’s fitness for office, a critique that the right associates with the left, the governor could make Trump’s criminal liability relevant as a matter of electability. We can’t nominate a man facing multiple felony charges, he would insist—not because that means he’s unfit, you see, but because the left’s trumped-up criminal accusations are destined to unfairly persuade swing voters to stick with Joe Biden in the general election. For the sake of defeating the Democrats and taking back America, Republicans must choose someone new.

That was supposed to be the pro-DeSantis media argument against Trump. It hasn’t worked out that way.

Trump is a skillful enough demagogue to have refashioned the primary into an us-and-them referendum on his legal troubles. To fault him for the criminal charges he’s facing, even if only as a matter of electability, is to endorse letting the corrupt left exploit the justice system to disqualify the right’s favorite candidate. It amounts to siding with Them against Us, a sin so mortal in a party dominated by populists that Trump’s Republican opponents won’t go near it. The most scathing critique that his next indictment is apt to inspire from the GOP field is that there’s too much “drama” around him, as if being charged for trying to overthrow the government is an especially messy reality-show episode.

Yesterday Ron DeSantis did his first non-pattycake interview of the campaign and ended up using it to say that he hopes the guy leading him by 30 points isn’t charged over January 6. That’s what’s left of his “electability” argument.

And this gets us into the structural reasons that conservative media can’t boost him effectively. The hard truth is that they’re in no better position than the governor is to risk taking the “Them” side of an inflammatory us-and-them conflagration. No matter how dominant your media position might be, no matter how much influence as a broadcaster you might have, you’re forever one major litmus test away from seeing your stature erode.

Shapiro, Musk, and the rest have passed that litmus test. It’s true, as I’ve said, that they prefer DeSantis to Trump, but what they haven’t done is suggest that Trump is unfit to be president again. Preferring a post-liberal governor whom they admire to a post-liberal former president whom they love is a venial sin among right-wing audiences; suggesting that their political hero is too corrupt to be trusted with power is something else altogether.

That’s what Sarlin means when he claims that populist right-wing media left DeSantis high and dry, I think. It’s not that the governor lacks supporters in that space. What he lacks is a full-court press by “influencers” to try to convince the base that we cannot do this again. Trump is unacceptable.

“It is a ghastly reality that the only job left that Donald Trump could get in this country is president of the United States,” Tom Nichols said recently. Ultimately, Trump’s comprehensive civic perversion is the only reason to strongly prefer DeSantis. But populist “influencers” were and are in no position to point that out.

In populist media, after all, the outlets are broadly fungible. For every Fox there’s a Newsmax, for every Daily Wire a Breitbart. If your outlet of choice fails to deliver the affirmation you’re seeking—if it claims Trump is unacceptable, for instance—the competition will deliver reliably. One might assume that an industry as creative as political media would inspire intense “brand” loyalties, with different personalities developing faithful followings who’ll hang with them even amid disagreements. There is some of that, of course, but I’d argue that modern Republican politics is more like religion. Parishioners may prefer their favorite “church” to others, but if the pastor abruptly abandons basic dogma—Trump is unacceptable—then they’re leaving. There are other churches around.

And the heads of each church know it.

Another structural problem is the fact that many conservative “influencers” are holdovers from the pre-Trump era, members of the ancien régime who’ve reinvented themselves to preserve a measure of status in the post-revolutionary age. They’re a mismatch ideologically with the sort of populist voters whom Trump drew to the GOP and who now populate the audience for pro-Trump media. Media figures have accommodated themselves to the whims of the new parishioners in the name of keeping the pews filled, but as Ron DeSantis himself recently learned, one can never fully escape one’s ancien régime pedigree.

Take Shapiro. He became a syndicated columnist when he was 17 years old, at the dawn of the George W. Bush administration. He spent the next 15 years before the arrival of Trump preaching the gospel of small-government conservatism. He’s a Reaganite ideologue at heart with the attendant policy preferences. So it makes sense that he’d prefer DeSantis, a former small-government ideologue himself and a candidate with a defined, ambitious policy program.

The same goes for all manner of conservative media figures and outlets who built their followings before Trump entered politics. Fox News, National Review, talk-radio stars like Mark Levin: They have a broader frame of reference on right-wing politics than johnny-come-lately Trumpists and so “conservatism” means something more to them than a catch-all term for “whatever Trump wants.” That makes them more sympathetic to DeSantis than the average Republican is.

But it also makes them potentially suspicious to many of the populists in their audiences who don’t prioritize the same way. “They look at their TVs, and there they want to see convulsions, outcries, the breakdown of dumb orderly proceedings,” C.T. May wrote of Republican voters. Ron DeSantis droning on about a 27-point plan to end DEI and ESG won’t cut it for many. They crave stronger stuff—government conspiracies, “deep state” persecution. Apocalypse now:

A media figure who’s made the shift from ancien regime to revolutionary can’t deem Trump unacceptable without squandering the revolutionary cred he’s earned. It would remind the real Jacobins that you’re not one of them, your pretensions notwithstanding. Once you’ve shown interest in returning to Republican politics before Year Zero, you’re finished as an influencer. 

I’ve discussed that before, calling it “the Rush Limbaugh problem” in honor of a man who spent 25 years preaching Reagan conservatism only to find himself ambivalent about it in 2016 when he realized his listeners had found a new icon. But it’s better thought of as “the Fox News problem” at this point. For all his faults, Rush never let his fear of getting on the wrong side of his audience grow so toxic as to end up costing him upward of a billion dollars.

If you want to fault conservative media influencers for not trying to join together, Voltron-like, in a unified effort to convince the GOP base after eight years that Trump Is Bad, I’m with you. They deserve your contempt for declining. The curse of this party since 2015 is that no one this side of Liz Cheney is willing to risk their ambition to try to stop him out of a sense of civic duty.

But let’s not pretend that their cowardice is the chief obstacle to a new nominee. They’d almost certainly fail even if they tried; deprogramming an organization like the modern GOP will take more than a few months of Ben Shapiro monologues after many years of monologues assuring them that, actually, Trump Is Good. Especially with Trump campaigning increasingly overtly on the idea that Republicans need to reelect him president to keep him out of jail.

Once he commits fully to that message, I suspect his polling will reach 65 percent.

What I’m more interested in is whether, with DeSantis seemingly entering the “doom loop” phase of a failing campaign, some of the conservative outlets that cautiously supported him to this point will ditch him and scramble back toward Trump to return to his good graces. The only thing worse than seeing their preferred candidate crash and burn is seeing their preferred candidate crash and burn while losing audience share in the process. When the end comes from Ron, he won’t have any friends left.