The Propaganda is the Point

Donald Trump, as we all know, monitors Fox News and conservative media obsessively, and with a sweep of his pen, DeSantis telegraphed his loyalty to the autocratic 45th president who’s still working, six months later, to knock the legs out from the under the credibility of last November’s election result.

The event in West Palm Beach is of a piece with the closed-door news conference in March where Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed his state’s own restrictive voting bill, and whose most indelible image remains state Rep. Park Cannon, a Black woman lawmaker, being hauled away by police after trying to gain entrance to the room where the public’s business was being conducted.

From Atlanta and West Palm, it’s ridiculously easy to draw a straight line to Capitol Hill, where Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney is about to lose her job in the House GOP leadership, not for being sufficiently conservative (she is staunchly conservative), but for refusing to bend the knee to the government-in-exile in Florida, and for refusing to push the Big Lie that the election was stolen.

In Biden’s first 100 days in office, Republicans refused to put up any votes for the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill that was wildly popular among voters - including their own. But they have not been shy about rushing out to take credit for it.

It now seems baked in that Democrats will have to pass Biden’s infrastructure and family bills without GOP votes as well, even though those proposals are similarly popular, and as a recalibrated electorate looks for the government to spend more and to shoulder more responsibilities.

But rather than take heed of this change in the national mood, Republicans - who are equal parts terrified of primaries from their right, and dead-set on recapturing Congress and the White House - have thrown in with a twice-impeached autocrat who still commands a scary cult-like hold on the GOP base.

And instead of governing, Republicans have methodically moved to whittle away as much of the electorate as they possibly can by shutting them out of the polls.

All of which makes Florida’s DeSantis the perfect public face of the GOP as it is now: Obsessed with hanging onto power, fact-averse, representing an ever-shrinking coalition, and loyal, not to the American public, but to the sad, strange old man who can’t accept that he lost.

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An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek. Copyright 2021 John L. Micek, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.