The defenestration of president-ish candidate Ron DeSantis continues, though instead of being blithely tossed out a window, he’s being awkwardly squeezed from it like offal through a sausage grinder.
Of course, he hasn’t given up yet! There’s still plenty of time to embarrass and debase himself between now and Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, so he’s doing just that—in part by doubling down on his years-long commitment to killing as many people with preventable diseases as possible.
At a New Hampshire town hall Wednesday, DeSantis went as MAGA as he possibly could on COVID-19, short of rolling Dr. Anthony Fauci out on a dolly with a rat cage bolted to his head. At one point, the Florida governor even claimed people who take a COVID-19 vaccine are actually more likely to get COVID.
Sure, that may sound bizarre, but remember: This is the same party that’s convinced millions of Americans that cutting wealthy people’s taxes generates more tax revenue.
Watch:
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DESANTIS: “They lied to us about the COVID shot. Remember? They said if you take a COVID shot you will not get COVID? How true was that? Not at all. Now, every booster you take you’re more likely to get COVID as a result of it. And they would never talk about any type of side effects. Think about this. Any pharmaceutical that is put on the market when they run these commercials, it’s like the first 30 seconds of the commercial, it’s usually like a married couple, probably like 60 to 65, just walking on the beach, whatever, laughing, having fun, because of this miracle drug, right? And then the next 30 seconds is, like, ‘you could die, heart attack, this, stroke.’ They list all the possible side effects because they’re covering their rear ends. But yet when the mRNA shots came out, they said with a very short lead time, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, no problem, you can’t have any questions,’ and that’s just not the way these things go.”
Now there’s a big, frosty mug of fuck no. Is someone feeling a bit desperate?
Or maybe DeSantis really believes what he’s saying. If, after he drops out, he dedicates the remainder of his sad, squalid life to slapping vitamin D supplements from the mouths of rickets kids, we’ll know he’s really sincere in his opposition to 21st century Western medicine. If not, well, fuck you, you morally debauched pestilence-pusher.
Shall we break it down? No one ever said you couldn’t get COVID-19 if you got vaccinated against it. Even early on, health officials acknowledged there would be breakthrough cases. Secondly, the idea that people taking boosters are actually more susceptible to COVID is easily debunked nonsense, much like DeSantis himself. Finally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has always been upfront about side effects, going so far as to pause the administration of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine to evaluate a blood-clotting disorder that occurred in just six women who had taken the shot. What we do know for sure is that the vaccines have saved millions of lives worldwide and that taking the jab(s) significantly decreases one’s chance of dying from COVID-19.
But none of that matters when you’re running as a MAGA-fried presidential candidate—and losing. Though DeSantis embraced the vaccines shortly after their rollout, he became a vaccine skeptic and appointed a quack surgeon general who’s made a habit of disparaging the lifesaving shots. And he’s been unable to make serious inroads against the OG medical disinformation candidate himself, Donald J. Trump.
But how hard can this be? He’s running against a confirmed assault perpetrator who tried to end American democracy and continually acts like a 6-year-old who just read The Turner Diaries for the first time. But in DeSantis’ pre-post-mortem, he appears to be settling on a clear reason for his failures: It’s the media’s fault for not forcing him to appear on their shows.
For the nontweeters:
DeSantis says he regrets early campaign strategy of shunning the media.
“I should have just been blanketing. I should have gone on all the corporate shows… we had an opportunity, I think, to come out of the gate and do that and reach a much broader folk,” he tells @hughhewitt
Despite spending a mere five months assiduously turning off Iowa voters, DeSantis managed to come in a distant second in the state’s caucuses on Monday, but he’s looking to get flat-out walloped in New Hampshire—both by Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Which isn’t all that surprising since he acts like a Manchurian candidate who never woke up from his initial hypnotic trance, and who looks like he learned to smile by bobbing for apples at the Iowa State Fair.
But his outlook in New Hampshire is bad. Really bad. According to a new Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll, Trump currently enjoys 50% support in the Granite State to Haley’s 36%—while DeSantis, at 5%, continues to sink into the Okefenokee.
In other words, barring a miracle, all the vaccine disinformation in the world is unlikely to save DeSantis’ presidential campaign. After all, Trump has the anti-intellectual vote nailed down, because even anti-intellectuals can spot a phony. DeSantis has the practiced mien of a guy who went to Yale but pretends he doesn’t know what science is, whereas Trump came about his pig-ignorance more or less honestly.
So DeSantis is likely toast, and if he had any concern for his country, he’d drop out now to give Haley a puncher’s chance in New Hampshire. In fact, DeSantis’ own people have been speaking, sotto voce, about his putrefying political corpse for weeks.
For a candidate who talks at length about his own disinterest in “managing America’s decline,” people around Mr. DeSantis are increasingly talking about managing his.
Ryan Tyson, Mr. DeSantis’s longtime pollster and one of his closest advisers, has privately said to multiple people that they are now at the point in the campaign where they need to “make the patient comfortable,” a phrase evoking hospice care. Others have spoken of a coming period of reputation management, both for the governor and themselves, after a slow-motion implosion of the relationship between the campaign and an allied super PAC left even his most ardent supporters drained and demoralized.
Bottom line: It’s likely, if not certain, that we won’t have Ron DeSantis to kick around much longer. Then again, even steel-toed shit-kickers would do less damage to Ron’s campaign than his own choice of footwear.
Oof. How did this guy ever falter for a moment with razor-sharp political instincts like that?
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