Keeping up appearances
By 
America’s Beloved COVID Governor, everyone:
desantis sounds entirely too petulant to ever become president, imo https://t.co/qIP4d8jkYV— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) March 2, 2022
I agree with Jamelle that in the context of a presidential primary DeSantis’s “whiny, entitled Ivy League shithead” routine is going to come off as much more Brett Kavanaugh than Trump. It will have more appeal to the political press than actual voters.
This is telling though, because it underscores the core Republican beliefs that have succeeded in their mission of making Omicron far more deadly in the US than in peer countries despite the near-universal availability of a free, safe and effective vaccine. Republican elites, taking their cue from Trump, above all DO NOT WANT TO BE REMINDED THAT PEOPLE ARE GETTING SICK AND DYING. DeSantis’s rage at seeing students voluntarily wearing masks should make it clear that “freedom” has nothing to do with it. It’s much more “the pandemic is over as long as people are just choking to death behind closed doors where even their loved ones can’t see them.” Encouraging people to get vaccinated would require acknowledgement that there’s a pandemic going on and people who get infected can’t always save themselves with horse medicine, and this is unacceptable. Affluent Republicans shouldn’t have to be reminded about that, any more than they should have to be reminded about the lives of people who don’t have health insurance.