Right on cue, legacy media declares DeSantis even more dangerous than Trump

Corporate media’s legacy of maligning former President Donald Trump set a standard by which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is being measured, and leftists have continued to escalate.

“No one is more dangerous for the White House than Ron DeSantis — including Donald Trump.”

Motives may differ on the near-term goal of demonizing the governor, be it to bolster or hamper his chances at winning the nomination, but the final objective for progressive-aligned commentators is a Democratic victory in 2024.

Having spent years treating Trump as the apex of Republican baddies (think “orange man bad”), he has undoubtedly become the bar of which DeSantis’ reputation is being pushed to surpass.

“For much of the establishment media today,” DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital, “there is a need to create a boogeyman out of whichever right-of-center politician is most likely to disrupt their preferred ideological vision.”

“Trump made it easy for the progressive media to attack him as a threat to democracy, but even before that, the ideologically driven media made out George W. Bush, and presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney, of all people, as dangerous threats to the media’s preferred order,” he continued.

“The left-of-center media is now going after DeSantis as a sort of preemptive strike to establish a narrative that can be continued should DeSantis emerge as the GOP nominee,” the professor argued.

Examples of this have been covered by American Wire News, like how MSNBC columnist Ruth Ben-Ghiat had warned DeSantis would “turn back the clock on social progress in America by silencing and disenfranchising tens of millions who don’t fit into Republicans’ white Christian vision for the nation,” and, as though it were a bad thing, charged, “Remember at the height of the pandemic, he invited policemen and others who didn’t want to submit to tyrannical mask mandates to come and be free in Florida.”

Likewise, earlier this month “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin had pushed back on DeSantis’ show of support for U.S. Marine Corps vet Daniel Penny, charged with second-degree manslaughter for the choking death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway.

“He’s in the business of otherizing people. But what I will say: what scares me about Ron DeSantis is that he offers Trumpism without Trump. So those people so repelled by Donald Trump, and there are many people, won’t be as repelled by him, I think,” she remarked. “And those manufactured culture issues seem to be very effective with that base, that particular base, and part of the Republican Party as well.”

Other examples include MSNBC’s David Jolly referring to DeSantis as “far more dangerous” than Trump, the HuffPost headlining a piece, “No one is more dangerous for the White House than Ron Desantis — including Donald Trump,” as well as similar takes from Vox, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post where columnist Max Boot wrote “DeSantis is smarter than Trump,” which “may make him more of a threat.”

“Yes, it turns out that being slightly less disgusting, a good bit more coherent, than Trump, is a viable GOP lane,” Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast offered. “DeSantis is like Shakespeare compared to the former president. He doesn’t talk about grabbing people by their genitals or dating his daughter. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that these days Trump is the poor man’s DeSantis, which is pretty ironic because DeSantis created himself in the image of Trump.”

In January, independent journalist Glenn Greenwald reacted to a different Vanity Fair article that suggested a DeSantis presidency “Would Be as Terrifying as a Trump One” by proposing a timeline wherein from 2015-2020, Trump was considered “Hitler,” “an unprecedented evil,” “a once-in-a-century monster,” and that “No man as destructive as Trump exists in US history.”

Now, he suggested the media had reached “Ron DeSantis is as evil as Trump” and by next year they would be contending “DeSantis makes Trump look good.” By 2025, he said the story would be “DeSantis makes Hitler look good.”

Columnist Joe Concha offered his reasons for the attacks and told Fox News Digital, “The first is that the media has a vested interest in Donald Trump being the GOP nominee because he’s good for clicks and ratings.”

“The second reason is many of them believe that DeSantis would be a stronger general election candidate than Trump, because he can attract independents, suburban women, disenfranchised Democrats, as we witnessed during his landslide victory in November,” he presented. “If DeSantis is such a threat to democracy, how did he win so many Democratic counties in Florida?”

Among those reacting to the idea of DeSantis being “dangerous” was his campaign’s rapid response director Christina Pushaw who tweeted, “What a strange endorsement of @RonDeSantis.”

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