Thread by @lesleyabravanel

Snippets from long @NewYorker article about the GOP flavor of the month. “Ron is the most selfish person I have ever interacted with. He has always loved embarrassing and humiliating people. I’m speaking for others—he was the biggest dick we knew."--a college 'pal' of DeSantis.

“To me, Ron DeSantis is a fairly run-of-the-mill politician who will do anything to get elected,” he said. “The problem is what the Party has become. It’s a race to the bottom.”--@GOP Stuart Stevens

“Ron’s weakness as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck. Big donors? He doesn’t give a shit. Cancels on them all the time.” "There’s no eye contact and little or no interaction. The moment I start to ask him a question, his head twitches.

You can tell he doesn’t want to be there.” (DeSantis’s office declined requests for comment.)
“Ron’s a user,” the former colleague told me. “If you had utility to him, he would be nice to you. If you didn’t, he wouldn’t give you the time of day.”

DeSantis helped found the Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only club of hard-right conservatives, and he was among the Republicans who took the government to the brink of default by refusing to raise the national-debt ceiling.

Many people worried that the move would harm the government’s credit rating and the country’s economy. Even John Boehner, the House Speaker, opposed it. In a recent phone interview, Trump took credit for DeSantis’s victory, saying,“If I didn’t endorse him, he wouldn’t have won.”

“Trump opened Pandora’s box and let them out. And all the nasty stuff that was in the underbelly of American politics got a voice. What was thirty-five per cent of the Republican Party is now eighty-five per cent. And it’s too late to turn back.”

Florida cardiologist Dr. Bernard Ashby said that, early in the pandemic, DeSantis failed to alleviate the crisis by helping make such treatments as monoclonal antibodies available. “He is either completely ignorant of the science, or he’s doing what I suspect, playing politics.”

The more DeSantis appeared on Fox and similarly strident platforms, the more polarizing his rhetoric became. He refused to say that President Biden had been legitimately elected; he referred instead to the Biden “regime” & adopted the language of the President’s cruder detractors

DeSantis turned moments like the one with the Nazis to his advantage; the more he defied tradition, the more it thrilled his supporters. If DeSantis’s legislative strategy was polarizing, that seemed to be the point. When attacked, he gave no quarter; he went after reporters

aggressively, sometimes inaccurately, often in person.

Glenn Morris, the director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute, at the University of Florida, said, “He’s questioning the vaccine because he knows who his constituency is.” By 2022, Florida ranked twenty-second in the

nation in its percentage of vaccinated adults, making it one of the lowest-ranking large states.
DeSantis’s insistence on preventing mandates sometimes violated the kinds of liberties he championed in his campaign book—former core principles of the Republican Party.

Giving people the right to go to work unvaccinated also meant telling companies that they were not free to decide how to manage their employees. And preventing mask mandates meant telling town governments and schools that they were not free to enforce local standards.

The laws meant that schools had to open but were powerless to compel students to wear masks or to get vaccinated. Local officials were mystified and angry. “People were dying all around me, including family members,” Joy Bowen, a school-board member in Leon County, said.

On several occasions, the University of Florida prohibited professors from testifying as expert witnesses in court cases that were brought against DeSantis’s policies. “The policy was, we couldn’t do things on campus that tick off the Governor,” according to one of the faculty.

Daniel Smith and other professors sued the university and won; a federal judge said, “U.F. has bowed to perceived pressure from Florida’s political leaders and has sanctioned the unconstitutional suppression of ideas out of favor with Florida’s ruling party.”

“There is only one reason that [dangerous quack Surgeon General Joseph] Ladapo was hired as a professor, and that is to support the Governor’s policies,” Goldhagen, the doctor who was barred from testifying, said.

In all, more than seventy-five thousand people died of covid in Florida, one of the country’s highest totals. Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, argued that as many as half of those lives could have been spared if DeSantis had mandated masks and vaccines

This month, as vaccines were approved for children younger than five, every state in the country rushed to order supplies—except for Florida, where DeSantis resisted until he was overwhelmed by criticism.

It seems conceivable that he could attempt something similar on a national level—though some political observers wonder whether he could endure the countless hours of banal conversation required to succeed in a national election.

“He’s going to have to go sit in a diner and listen to the local county chairman jerk off for twenty minutes,” a Republican consultant told me. “I don’t know if he can do that.” #RemoveRon
newyorker.com/magazine/2022/…

newyorker.com/humor/borowitz…