DeSantis plays game of ‘Who can be as cruel as Trump’ on the backs of immigrant children
Whenever I read about Ron DeSantis’s latest antics, the words that come to mind are the sort of words that as a kid I would hurl at the guy on the court that elbowed me in the jaw as I drove to the basket, or the pitcher that threw at my head in a Little League game. Obscene words you don’t want to utter in front of your mother but are well-deserved by a political prostitute. Correction: DeSantis is less honorable than a sex worker and is more like the kind of predator that abuses prostitutes for practice.
Antic—a grotesque, fantastic, or ludicrous gesture, act, or posture—is the perfect word to describe what DeSantis does all the time. His M.O, as the cops call a criminal’s characteristic method of operation. Come to think of it, DeSantis’s Covid-19 policies and misinformation should be crimes under any reasonable standard—they are responsible for large scale death and disease.
There were 58,220 Americans killed in Action in the Vietnam War, a decades-long war against a determined and effective adversary fighting on its home turf. Covid-19 has killed 62,073 people in Florida in a couple of years. DeSantis is not to blame for 100 percent of this awful toll, but he is responsible for a good proportion of it.
But DeSantis’ predatory crimes are not limited to Covid-19. Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell describes how the Florida Governor is weaponizing immigrant children in the game of “who can be as cruel as Trump” he is playing with other right-wing Republican governors.
Being as obnoxious a jerk as Trump is a high bar indeed, so DeSantis must stick his unsanitary fingers in every pie and joust with every right-wing bogeyman. Education and Trump-style Republicanism have zero intersection. Thus, the University of Florida, the flagship institution of higher learning in the state and its professors have become one of his favorite targets. According to the Miami Herald, DeSantis’s moneybags fellow Republican, Morteza “Mori” Hosseini, who heads the UF Board of Trustees, “was back channel to DeSantis office over pandemic and remote classes.”
As a UF grad, I am ashamed to say that Kent Fuchs, the university’s president, has been the opposite of a profile in courage and integrity. He told interviewers that “he does not have the authority to challenge decisions from the DeSantis administration.” Evidently, that is a lie. The blowback that resulted from DeSantis’s intervention forced Fuchs to reverse himself.
Even as a defeated and disgraced former president, Trump continues to pull a tidal wave of lies and cowardice in his wake.
