Crisis Actors

 A common trope in the Right is that anytime there's a distressing event linked to preferred GOP policies - mass shootings being the most common - the victims are dismissed as "crisis actors". George Soros paid them to pretend that their kids were killed; this was at the heart of the Alex Jones lawsuit.

I think, however, we need to acknowledge the real crisis actors today: the former institutional wing of the GOP. People like Ron DeSantis.

The DeSantis boomlet (oddly touted by Chait himself) sought to cast DeSantis as the heir to Trumpism. He wasn't the manifestly unfit goon, the impulsive idiot that Trump is. DeSantis was disciplined! He could tap into Trump's populism while focusing on destroying the regulatory state and cutting taxes, like a good Republican. 

It collapsed for two reasons.

The first was that DeSantis is a deeply unlikeable goombah. He simply cannot do retail politics. He was able to use Trumpist rhetoric to win the governorship of Florida, but the more you get to know him, the less you like him.

The second is that Trumpism is not the lyrics, it's the music. Trump has few things that can be discussed as policies in the traditional sense of the word. Even when there is a specific policy - think the border wall - he lacks the ability to follow through, because he's an impulsive moron. Following through and building the wall is entirely beside the point though. You have to gesture at a wall (the lyrics) but the real meaning is anti-immigrant xenophobia (the music). Populism tends to collapse under the scrutiny of logic - or increasingly in a court of law.

What's going to be interesting is whether Nikki Haley can consolidate enough support to legitimately challenge Trump. She's recently been hitting him on his age (Trump confused Haley and Nancy Pelosi recently) and New Hampshire is about as favorable a landscape as she can hope for. Still, she's likely to go down to defeat soon, too.

At which point all the crisis actors within the GOP will pretend that Trump makes sense. They will pretend he's not a dictator in waiting (some will embrace that). They will line up behind a guy they know is manifestly unfit, and act like he's a legitimate choice to be president.

Ron DeSantis' epic failure of a campaign faceplanted because people can sense when someone is just mouthing the words and doesn't know the music. He was a fake, hell Nikki "America was never racist" Haley is a fake, too. Trump isn't. He's a legitimate racist who shares all the seething resentment of his cultists.