Iowa open thread, if anyone cares
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With the only question on the tale being how badly The Man Who Won the Pandemic (TM) gets humiliated, it’s worth remembering how the conservative media spent months trying to prop him up like Weekend At Bernie’s until it became apparent that Talahassee’s most popular Loving Tribute to Taylor Swift was not going to be able to outdraw Taylor Swift:
Meeting with reporters Friday, Ron DeSantis blurted out something every Republican politician knows, but never says: Conservative media does not hold Republicans accountable. “He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the web sites, all the stuff — they just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers,” he said of Donald Trump. “And they don’t want to have their ratings go down.”
DeSantis is running through the bitter final days of an immensely disappointing presidential campaign that saw him transformed from the shining knight of the post-Trump party to a punch line. And so he is understandably lashing at at the conservative media, which is now operating mainly as a public-relations vehicle for the candidate who is destroying him.
One unmentioned irony is that a large chunk of this very same conservative-media apparatus used to work for DeSantis. After January 6, when Republicans assumed Trump was radioactive, conservative media set out to wean the base off Trump and get them hooked on DeSantis. “We want to make Trump a nonperson,” Rupert Murdoch wrote to a colleague. “We see [DeSantis] as the future of the party,” a Fox News producer wrote in an email obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. For a period of time from after the insurrection to the middle of last year, conservative media promoted DeSantis infomercial-style.
The flaw in the formula was that the dogs weren’t eating the dog food. An infamous clip revealed the moment when the network seemed to realize its miscalculation. Brian Kilmeade, apparently seeking to drum up support for the Florida governor, interviewed a series of diner guests, only to find all of them preferred Trump. At one point, he lunged in desperation toward a woman in a DeSantis T-shirt, only for her to say she was undecided between the two.
Propaganda and marketing hype can be very effective, but you can’t sell just anything to consumers, and Ron DeSantis was about as marketable in a Republican primary feat. Donald Trump as a Captain Morgan Gold-branded Juicero. Watching him get crushed will be one of the few pleasures available to American politics in 2024.