How to destroy the Trump personality cult

The failure of Ron DeSantis and the future of the Labour party

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Trump and DeSantis at a 2020 campaign rally (Getty)

At the risk of insulting the man, I want to argue that Ron DeSantis is losing his chance to become president of the United States of America because he thinks like an intellectual. A malign intellectual, I grant you, who panders to every paranoid delusion and mean prejudice, but an intellectual nevertheless.

It’s now embarrassingly evident that the poor fool believes in a rational model of politics. He thinks that if he shows extreme right-wing conspiracists that he supports extremely right-wing policies, they will make a rational choice and vote for him. 

DeSantis calculated that he had the votes of Republicans who wanted rid of Trump in  the bag. To win, he needed to convince far-right and on occasion neo-fascist voters that Trump was not extreme enough. They would nod and say “you’ve got a good point there, Ron” and switch their loyalties.

Like watching a child make a toy castle, you can see DeSantis putting his building blocks in place. DeSantis claimed that Trump was the criminals’ friend. Rather than deliver the obvious dig that Trump was the criminals’ friend because he was a criminal himself, DeSantis condemned Trump for agreeing in 2018 to ease prison overcrowding with the early release of non-violent criminals.

“He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill,” DeSantis proclaimed in May. “It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.”

Trump was soft on crime. And not only on crime. Because Trump had said in 2016 that he would "do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” after murders at a gay club in Florida, the DeSantis campaign retweeted a video that alleged that Trump was a wokist in MAGA clothing.

It is quite the weirdest thing I have seen this year, even on Twitter. The video included supposed evidence of Trump’s softness on the gender question intercut with images of well-oiled athletes and muscular warriors that were, frankly, a testament to its creators repressed homoeroticism.

DeSantis applauded it and accused Trump of being a pioneer of “injecting gender ideology” into mainstream American culture, which of all the charges levelled against him, is the most bizarre yet.

Nevertheless the import was clear. Trump wasn’t just a weakling on law and order but refused to adopt a suitably manly stance on LGBT+ questions too.

And then there’s covid. Trump and DeSantis take chunks out of each other over who was the worst bleeding heart liberal during the pandemic. In the competition for the conspiracist vote, DeSanits has the advantage. Trump authorised Covid vaccines when he was president. DeSantis can now hint to a paranoid audience that he agrees that the vaccines were a part of a plot by the elite to endanger the lives of the guinea pigs who took the shots.

According to the once popular rational choice theory of electoral behaviour, voters vote for candidates who uphold their values, and promise to implement their preferred policies.  If it were true, DeSantis should have appropriated a section of Trump’s base. Nothing of the sort has happened. From being close to level-pegging with Trump at the start of the year, DeSantis’s support has crashed. Trump now has a 37 percent lead among Republicans who are likely to vote in the presidential primaries.

If DeSantis has friends, they should have told him at the beginning that you don’t destroy a wannabee autocrat’s personality cult with arguments about policy. You destroy a “strongman” by showing that he is weak. Now when it looks like it is too late, DeSanits is trying to point out that Trump is a serial loser.