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Keep Focused and Ignore DeSantis vs. Trump
And we’re off! Governor DeSantis has made the unofficial, official. I did not listen but some accounts I have read indicate that the announcement may not have gone smoothly.
But that is irrelevant — DeSantis is in and is the only declared candidate anywhere close to challenging President Trump for the Republican nomination, and thus DeSantis vs. Trump is going to dominate infighting at least until some primary returns are counted.
But it is a distraction.
The presidency of Joe Biden has created enormous problems for the nation and they will continue unabated at least until January 2025. The problems are so many — legal, financial, cultural, national security — that one Progressive strategy seems to be paying off: if you present enough targets, you can’t shoot them all. And, if so, the Progressive contagion can be arrested at best but not defeated.
So it is going to take some prioritizing. Where do you start? What set of initiatives if the Progressives are turned out of federal power will have the most impact on restoring the nation?
The Republican nominee has to be able to address this and make the case that (1) he/she can persuade the voters that the Progressives cannot be allowed to stay in charge, and (2) the specific prioritized steps he/she will take to have the greatest impact on the totality of problems the Progressives have created.
Personally, I think Vivek Ramaswamy has a very good handle on this and is thinking in this way. But his profile is too low. I have contributed to his campaign and encourage others to do so to make sure he is in the picture and makes it into the debates. But I concede that it looks to be between DeSantis and Trump. But whichever side you choose, the enemy is the Progressive ideology as empowered in the Administrative State and its allies in corporations (specifically media, financial and technological) and academia, and the weakened judiciary.
And keep in mind that in order for the Progressives to be turned out of power, we need two things: (1) the ground game will need to be strong, any method of pulling together votes that is legal in the post-Covid world must be used by Republicans whether we think it correct or not, because the Progressives will be doing even if we don’t, and (2) we will need to get the support of voters to whom Republicans have traditionally not appealed. President Trump has been the absolute best at doing this, DeSantis needs to demonstrate that he can do so outside of Florida to even be considered to be the Republican standard bearer.
So as the candidates stump, evaluate them against the challenges described above. Are the attacks on Progressivism clear and persuasive? Do the planned actions address the most important problems? Does the candidate evidence a real connection to “common folk” — reflecting their priorities and concerns? Does their campaign organization have a handle on the new vote collection rules?
Personal snark between candidates is irrelevant. But be aware that some of the rhetoric is a stand-in for a larger question, e.g., when Trump claims that DeSantis is “disloyal,” he is really raising a question of whether DeSantis can be trusted to do what he promises to do; when DeSantis says he doesn’t know anything about how to pay off a paramour he is making an issue about judgment. President Trump has the advantage in that exchange because the voters can see his track record as President after his moral missteps, the voters are just now hearing promises from DeSantis at a national level that he hasn’t yet had a chance to fulfill or break.
There will be more of this — so much more. And the only way to get through it without pulling apart is to stay focused on the purpose of the General Election, to not get caught up in the nastiness of the back and forth. Instead, we need to evaluate how these exchanges demonstrate that the candidate is making the best case for victory in 2024.
Published in General
When exactly did Fauci’s fanboi letters to Hillary surface? Those told one all one needed to know about the little gnome’s likely attitude towards Trump.
I didn’t like Fauci later on when we started figuring out what he was. That still goes back to my question of what did Trump know that would have enabled him to fire a government worker for cause? As to the timeline, I don’t care enough to spend my weekend digging up my book on Fauci, plowing through my screenshots, and searching through my bookmarks.
I remember moving from laughing when a media jerk asked Trump if he was silencing Fauci after the media was concerned because Fauci wasn’t a spokesperson for something and the media jerk didn’t know who Fauci was. He was standing by Trump and Trump said no, he was and he told Fauci to step up and answer the question. Later, I suspected FUci was a leaking weasel.
China refused let let us investigate. It took a lot of research and FOIA requests to piece together the truth. Now I believe Fauci should be in jail. It isn’t happening. They will never investigate because they don’t want the answer. Every country in the world would sue us for our role.
My only sentiment when Trump was in office was he was poorly served by those government workers who were paid big bucks to advise him. Once he realized that, he sought out advice from those later proven right. The media and the Dems trashed them and accused Trump of not following the science. People and even many governors were not going to take the advice of “quacks” who were “unqualified” to speak on infectious diseases. As recently as yesterday I say a Twitter attack on Dr Jay. Trump was not the bad guy on Covid. His initial instincts were good but couldn’t overrule the advice from the paid experts because of the (later proven false) predictions of casualties from the Brit Imperial College.
I disagree. First, Pence was his lead on the Covid response team and they rolled Pence. Second, Trump is why it was up to each governor to call the shots in his state. You know darn well the bureaucrats in DC wanted nationwide Covid rules. The CDC was limited to the areas it already had control over like foreign flag cruise ships.
Yep, not a precedent we want Dems to use later.
I watched those briefings and didn’t have the same takeaway. There were some in the end where Fauci was relegated to a side chair. I enjoyed the briefings, were appointment listening moments for me. I have a link to the WH archives stashed so I can go back and get the transcripts. I think it was helpful getting Blix and Fauci on the record.
Wash, rinse, repeat. (Sigh)
I’m just an observer here. I didn’t watch Fauci, ever, except for one brief exchange with Sen. Rand. I never understood why people thought his role was such a big deal (though some here were kind enough, back in the day, to try to explain). I still don’t understand, and in fact don’t much care except for what it reveals about how an administration officer can get around congressional restrictions by simply choosing to do so. But I don’t like being asked to believe things that are apparently contradictory to what I did observe. I could be mistaken in what I observed. My memory is certainly not infallible. But I’m not going to believe I was mistaken without the evidence. I would think the easiest way to provide that evidence is in the form of a timeline, which I could then go and study for myself. But so far people keep changing the subject, and they think I’m changing the subject.
I think this is accurate. It was a time of immense worldwide fear. Trump’s natural willingness to engage the media on every single question worked to his disadvantage (and to the horrendous results many innocent people were made to suffer) when he brought Birx and Fauci up to share his stage. There was no protocol or regulation requiring him to do that. Those two were proverbial Trojan Horses.
I am saying pretty much the opposite. Trump should have fired Fauci for lying about gain of function, origins, mask effectiveness, blocking serology studies, and blocking anti-viral treatments. That should have been done in January 2020. It was probably possible to override a lot of the bad states, with Medicare leverage.
Trump was in the meetings with Pence and Birx. It was Trump that got rolled. Scott Atlas went to a few meetings and he complained that the policy did not agree with the observations. Trump, as he always does, choose the person he thought looked better on camera (Birx) to run the show. Conversely, DeSantis chose to get more data and stop the mandates. I don’t know what the next crisis will be, but if Trump is in charge, the policy will be controlled by the person that looks good on camera and DeSantis will chose data and conservative principles.
OK, now I will assert the timeline question: Not to slag DeSantis (because I believe there was a lot of manipulation going on that made restoring freedom politically risky, if you can believe it), Trump was calling upon the governors to reopen as early as April 2020 , Georgia started lifting restrictions in April 2020 (South Dakota never closed), Florida started a limited opening on May 4, 2020 that excluded Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties(the most populous region of the state) and finally did a full opening on September 25. Trump respected federalism, and DeSantis was amongst the first governors to begin restoring freedom. I call that a “push” but I suspect you feel differently. Scott Atlas joined the White House on August 10, 2020 (Wikipedia is good for the date but horrible in its analysis) so was not a factor in federal Covid policy (and Trump’s pronouncements pushing to open up the economy) before that.
Disagree. Gov. Kemp of Georgia was reamed by Trump when he announced Ga. would open at the end of April. DeSantis about two weeks behind him. I think Trump probably figured out, maybe by June, that the open states did not have higher death rates and people could actually go to work.
I think “reamed” is a faulty memory. Trump later reamed Kemp over election certification, but with respect to opening Georgia—
Hardly a “reaming” and in the context of the time (and the manipulation) not a hard push back on a small sector (albeit one that was terribly affected by government mandates).
This seems a good time to plug Rob Longs new long-form podcast. He is working on an 8 hour Covid retrospective.
Pence was still the lead. The on camera comment isn’t valid considering the positions the people held. “On February 27, 2020, Vice President Mike Pence appointed Birx to the position of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. As part of this role, Birx reported to Pence on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.[4][25] Pence called her his “right arm” on the task force.[26] ” Wikipedia check her bio on wiki.
Checked my timeline. This is the first screenshot of Fauci malfeasance.
How to spot a snake in the grass, and the biased reporting.…
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/opinions/deborah-birx-interview-filipovic/index.html
That much I believe. (See #48.) But thanks for the extra details, which I did not have.
You should extend your timeline back a few years. Plenty of malicious activity before 2021.
It does go back. Saw nothing criminal that we knew of.