Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

That Santos guy? His resume was ever more false than Hershel Walker’s. He lied about EVERYTHING. Where he went to school, where he worked, his experience…

I think there may be confidentiality reasons why the IRS couldn't say anything.

When you picture Ron DeSantis, is he smiling or glowering? Telling you about some new project he’ll bring to life or some group of people he’ll bring to their knees? Sowing inspiration or vowing retribution?

I’m guessing he’s the seething protagonist of a revenge thriller.

That’s precisely the starring role he wants.

Here’s DeSantis as he tortures Disney for daring to disagree with his pet education law — he’s a Republican contract killer coming for Mickey Mouse. Here he is punishing and publicly shaming a Tampa-area prosecutor who doesn’t share his restrictive views on abortion. And here he is insisting that a grand jury in Florida investigate Pfizer and Moderna for allegedly exaggerating the efficacy of Covid vaccines.

His big set piece is a sadistic game with migrants, whom he relocates from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard not to benefit them but to bedevil his Democratic adversaries. And his vow to make Florida “where woke goes to die”? Woke isn’t meeting any natural end in the Sunshine State. It’s crossing paths with an assassin.

The Florida governor and Republican supernova models a version of politics not as messy theater for problem solving but as spiteful arena for retaliation, in which you’re defined by your enemies — or, rather, by how effectively you torment them.

An arena like the House of Representatives in the new year, when Republicans assume control of the chamber. How soon will they come for Hunter Biden? Anthony Fauci? Alejandro Mayorkas? They’re itching to impeach anyone who sits still long enough to be impeached. They’re bent on humiliation.

That approach isn’t new, nor is it confined to one party. It’s what has turned Supreme Court confirmation hearings into such splenetic spectacles, with senators scoring the most points by exhibiting the most disdain for nominees and making them squirm most visibly.

But Donald Trump raised it several nasty notches during and after his 2016 presidential campaign, when he beamed as his Hillary-hating supporters chanted, “Lock her up!” He understood that in an era of such intense negative partisanship, with so many people voting against the other team, grudges were gold.

“He enjoyed some of his success by being viciously retaliatory,” James Kimmel Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, said when we spoke recently. “That has worked for him, at least in outward-seeming ways.” It carried him to “the highest pulpit that the country has available,” Kimmel noted, and other people — including other politicians — extract lessons from that.

DeSantis did. That’s obvious in his public remarks, like the ones he made in Pennsylvania on behalf of Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of the state, before the midterms. Gabriel Sherman described the scene in a profile of DeSantis in Vanity Fair:

He offered cursory praise for Mastriano and then uncorked a grievance-fueled stump speech that sounded like it had been written by A.I. plugged into Fox News. In DeSantis’s telling, the honest people of Florida were besieged by a vast array of liberal scourges: Big Tech, I.R.S. agents, George Soros, the Biden administration, the corporate media, illegal immigrants, Anthony Fauci, police defunders, Disney, China, communism, cancel culture, critical race theory, and woke gender ideology. Only Ron DeSantis was brave enough to confront these malign forces.

The cynicism and nihilism stoked by rants like that get the country nowhere, and the supremacy of revenge as a political tactic allows politicians who are receiving legitimate scrutiny — as Trump is for his tax returns — to explain it away as reflexive payback. If everyone’s perceived as indiscriminately vengeful, no investigation has merit and no investigator is on the side of the angels.

That suits DeSantis. He’s a self-styled terminator and, silly me, I thought real leaders were supposed to be germinators. But that’s not the temper of these times. DeSantis has sized them up accurately. And shrunk himself accordingly.

But you don’t think it could be something much simpler and more human, like just being scared?

But you don’t think it could be something much simpler and more human, like just being scared?

I don't know that. It's as much a possibility as any alternative, yet believable, theory. I was relating what some legal commentators have said about it.

As a prosecutor, even in a case as unprecedented as this one, it's not as if he's in mortal danger – at least I hope not. He can't convict anyone without the vote of a jury and I think every prosecutor in a high profile case understands that acquittal is always a possibility. It's not the same as the cops who wildly open fire when they fear for their lives; it's a legal drama in a courtroom.

What do you think might be scaring him?

And are you satisfied with Jack Smith's performance so far? (Seems to me he's doing a pretty good job.)

But the only thing that I will judge this AG and DOJ (or their appointed special counsels)on is how they do or do not pursue Trump and the others in power who were foundationally responsible for an attempted coup.