Ron DeSantis is in many ways even worse than Trump. Trump is a broken, stupid man; a narcissist cocooned from consequences his whole life by celebrity and wealth.
DeSantis looked at Trump and learned the lesson that cruelty is the way to the heart of the GOP primary voter. His decision to go to Texas, find legal asylum seekers and then ship them to Martha's Vineyard is simply an extension of Adam Serwer's famous dictum: "The cruelty is the point." What Greg Abbott is doing is awful, what DeSantis is doing is awful, but also forced and artificial.
Broadly speaking, the GOP is suddenly facing some headwinds in the midterms. Gas prices are dropping, Ukraine is winning, and then there's Dobbs. They desperately want to change the topic to something they think will motivate the amygdala of their cranky old voters: immigration. It was anti-immigrant rhetoric as much as anything that propelled Trump to power, and I think they are desperate to make that the focus of the midterms.
The DeSantis plan was to ship a bunch of asylum seekers to a liberal enclave to embarrass the libs. Instead, so many residents of the Vineyard came out to support these migrants that the police had to urge them to stay away. That won't make a bit of difference in the closed ecosystem of conservative media, though, and that is what DeSantis and Abbott are counting on.
I think there's some real question as to just how legal these stunts are. Is it kidnapping? Human trafficking? It would certainly be consistent if the Q-Anon party turned out to be actually trafficking people. (Every accusation is a confession.)
It is just fundamentally depressing that the Republican Party has gone from likeable idiots like Bush to unlikeable to smart people like Romney to unlikeable idiots like DeSantis and Trump.
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