America’s dream: Gavin Newsom vs Ron DeSantis for president
The US yearns to break free from another Trump-Biden contest, with all its tawdry, dismal, schlock regalia.
If the world was a saner place, if Western politics were not so deranged, the US would be heading towards a presidential race next year between Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and California’s Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom.
Instead it seems destined to endure again surely the worst presidential choice in history: Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Here is the rematch in all its tawdry, dismal, schlock regalia: the deranged versus the decrepit, the perennially furious against the increasingly feeble, two purveyors of self-serving, incoherent waffle who both look increasingly sleazy.
A contest between DeSantis and Newsom, on the other hand, both of them boringly free of personal scandal, would offer a clear choice between two coherent but contradictory views of how the US should be governed, involving two politically successful governors, both handsomely re-elected, overseeing vast economies.
It may yet be possible. Party primary opinion polls are hugely unreliable at this stage of the cycle.
Both Trump and Biden sustained damage this week. DeSantis could beat Trump for the Republican nomination, though that looks unlikely. Trump is miles ahead today. Sanity could get a look-in on the Democrat side and Biden discover in himself a new medical condition that means he better stand down.
It’s unlikely any serious Democrat heavyweight, such as Newsom, will challenge Biden. It’s almost impossible for an incumbent president to lose his party’s nomination. Sitting presidents who are seriously challenged in primaries do however typically lose the general election, as Jimmy Carter did after Teddy Kennedy challenged him for the 1980 nomination. No senior Democrat can risk wounding Biden’s presidency but not killing it, thereby helping Trump win.
Newsom has grown close to Biden. It’s widely recognised that Vice-President Kamala Harris is pretty well hopeless. If Biden stood down as the Democrat presidential candidate, Newsom could replace him.
This week Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, 53, got the sweetest legal deal you can imagine. For failing to pay perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax, he pleads to misdemeanours with no jail time. And for gun offences while a drug addict, for which he could have been charged with a felony, he effectively gets put into a diversion program in which he promises not to own a gun again and to stay clean from drugs.
Everything about the way Biden Jr has acquired millions of dollars, and spread this around family members, reeks of sleaze. Biden Jr has no discernible skills and a long history of drug abuse. While his dad was vice-president, Biden Jr was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by companies in countries for which his father had policy responsibility.
More recently, he has made money by his wonderfully gifted amateur paintings, which show in selected galleries and are bought, anonymously, for hundreds of thousands of dollars by people who, would you believe, have no ulterior motive. I once interviewed Colonel Gaddafi’s son who displayed similar remarkable talents while his dad ran Libya.
Famously, at the last election a laptop turned up full of salacious material that belonged to Hunter Biden. On the advice of federal police and intelligence agencies, the hi-tech platforms accepted it was Russian disinformation and censored stories about it. It turned out the laptop was not Russian disinformation. Most objectionable was the way intelligence and law enforcement agencies conspired to suppress a legitimate story during an election.
These latest Hunter Biden shenanigans have two consequences for Joe Biden. There may be absolutely no illegality on the part of the president. Nothing has been proven against him. But like the Clintons when Bill was making so much money out of countries dealing with Hillary as secretary of state, it shows an odious, sleazy approach to family money-making, all the worse coming from folks who claim to have devoted their lives to the underprivileged.
Thrashing Hunter with a legal feather is a stunning contrast to prosecutors’ ruthlessness with Trump. The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, declared: “If you are the President’s leading opponent, the Department of Justice tries literally to put you in jail. If you are the President’s son, you get a sweetheart deal.”
This isn’t a view held only by Trump supporters. It’s shared by millions of voters, many of whom would never support Trump yet regard the cases against him as an abuse of process. This is leading to Americans losing faith in their institutions. Similar dynamics are at work on both sides. Democrat attacks on the US Supreme Court, because sometimes it doesn’t rule the way they like, equal in ferocity Republican scepticism about the Justice Department.
None of this is an argument in favour of Trump. As John Howard argues, Trump’s behaviour after he lost the 2020 presidential election, denying the legitimacy of the result, trying to get his vice-president, Mike Pence, to break the constitution by refusing to certify the results, and his demagogic language and histrionics, render him unfit for high office.
The most difficult thing with Trump is to retain balance. Trump is a disgraceful individual, an inveterate liar. But as president he got some big calls right and did some good things. And many things his opponents say about him are untrue.
In the documents case, he seems to have acted with characteristic, reckless irresponsibility. That’s not to justify the prosecution. But according to the indictment, Trump had nuclear security documents, including how the US would respond to military attacks and others related to the US attacking Iran. This isn’t yet proven, but documents were strewn all over his Mar-a-Lago residence, in the bathrooms, the toilets, the bedrooms, countless boxes without any order.
Trump’s lawyers told the FBI they had returned all the classified documents when they hadn’t. That means Trump is potentially in a lot of legal trouble. He made things worse this week when he did a one-on-one interview with Bret Baier, a capable journalist, in a studio rather than in a hall where he can whoop it up with an audience. He spoke with characteristic incoherence but admitted he knew he had classified documents, and knew he still had them after the authorities had been told he had returned them.
This still doesn’t mean the prosecution was necessary. Once the FBI had retrieved the documents there was no longer a national security problem. Not only that, a conviction is by no means assured. First, the trial will take place in front of a Florida jury, some of whom may well be convinced that the legal system is rigged against Trump.
Second, prosecutors acted with extraordinary ruthlessness against Trump, finding reasons to threaten even his lawyers with jail terms. Many US laws are vague and contradictory. With enough prosecutorial zeal you can find some process offence against almost anyone involved in government. Who knows what might have turned up if the Bidens or the Clintons had been prosecuted with a trace of such zeal?
It’s true that at Trump’s 2016 election rallies the crowds, appallingly, chanted “Lock her up!” in reference to Hillary Clinton. It’s also true his administration didn’t launch prosecutions against Clinton. It’s true, too, that Trump may have a legal defence under the Presidential Records Act.
But what an almighty mess this is at the highest level of US politics. Trump and Biden are co-dependents, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of the most hideous episode in politics as implausible reality TV. Biden got the Democratic nomination only because it was thought, as the most unthreatening Democrat, he stood the best chance of beating Trump. He won in 2020 by motivating voters against Trump.
Now, Democratic jurisdictions are launching legal actions against Trump to keep him the centre of attention, cynically, to outrage the Republican base, so that in defiance it nominates Trump again. Trump might well be, as others have argued, the only senior Republican Biden could beat. Biden probably is the only senior Democrat Trump could beat.
Here are two statistics that show what a dysfunctional contest this is set to be. Some 67 per cent of independent voters think Trump should be indicted. Trump cannot win unless he gets a big share of independents. But 65 per cent of all registered voters think Biden is “too old to effectively serve another four-year term”.
America yearns to break free of this toxic twosome. But as President, Biden controls his party, while Trump has a lock on that part of the Republican base that votes in primaries. Which means it’s unlikely the US will get the DeSantis-Newsom match-up that would be so healthy.
Newsom is 55, DeSantis 44, both decades younger than Biden the octogenarian and Trump the septuagenarian. California is the most populous US state, with 40 million people, Florida its third most populous, with a population nearly the size of Australia’s. California is a Democrat stronghold, Florida solidly Republican.
Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor, is a climate change maximalist and a card-carrying left liberal. His state has immense natural advantages, huge resources of land and people, a legacy of internationally leading universities, especially Stanford, as well as the centre of the IT industry, in Silicon Valley, from San Francisco to San Jose. It dominates entertainment through Hollywood.
But California is a bit like the US itself. Much of its wealth was built when the west was a freewheeling alternative to the prissy east coast and languishing south, especially when Ronald Reagan was the state’s two-term governor.
Now its establishment, of which Newsom is a perfect representative, is as woke as woke can be. A bit like the US in the international system, California is used to getting its own way because of its size. If it imposes heavy emissions regulations on vehicles these become almost de facto national regulations. Everyone needs to interact with California.
It’s a high-tax jurisdiction, with continuing union influence, especially in education. If limousine liberalism has not hurt the rich; they buy whatever they need, but it has hurt the poor. Many of its cities now are three tiered: the rich left who live like modern princes, the poor and underclass whose lives are blighted by drugs, lawlessness homelessness, wretched schools and identity politics madness. And an increasingly worried, stressed and shrinking middle.
California under Newsom is the end point of woke correctness on race, gender, drug liberalisation, police reform, and progressive ideology in school and university education. As a result it’s losing population at a rapid rate.
Florida is California’s opposite in every way. One of DeSantis’s campaign T-shirts bears the logo: “Where woke goes to die”. One reason Republicans, minus Trump, should be winning lots of elections is the success of Florida and Texas, two southern sunbelt states surging in population as people and businesses flee jurisdictions such as California.
DeSantis takes everything about Trump that is sensible and transforms it into a coherent government program. Thus DeSantis rightly says the left controls most US institutions. He plans to change that as president and has changed it as governor. DeSantis would transform what all Republicans now see as a politicised Department of Justice, FBI and indeed some of the intelligence agencies‘ leadership.
DeSantis is a fascinating mixture. He talks of Christian values but in a more sophisticated way than Trump. Unlike Trump, he actually is a lifelong Christian. He has signed into legislation a tough law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Electorally, that would probably be a serious net negative in a presidential election. But for folks who believe abortion is the taking of innocent life, DeSantis has produced the most significant result.
He is a conservationist who has preserved Florida waterways and the Everglades but he won’t sign up to sweeping climate change action and strongly backs gas. He has effectively banned teaching LGBTI ideology in junior schools or teaching critical race theory. He has made it easier for parents to start their own schools. He says: “My wife and I just believe that kids should be able to go to school, watch cartoons, just be kids, without having some agenda shoved down their throats.”
That quote is telling. DeSantis positions himself in the culture wars as a spokesman for ordinary folks and common sense. He provides a good environment for businesses but opposes woke posturing from big public companies.
One of his most controversial moves is to fly or bus illegal immigrants into rich northern liberal cities. Yet surely those jurisdictions that vote and campaign against effective controls on the US’s southern borders should welcome such people with open arms.
A thousand horror scenarios loom. Imagine if Trump loses the popular vote by, say, eight million, with huge votes against him in California and New York, but wins the presidency legitimately, notwithstanding whatever legal difficulties he’s in, winning midwest states by the narrowest margins. More than half the country would reject his legitimacy and the US could really be on the brink of civil breakdown. But the situation is so messy, so fluid, that anything is possible, even a good outcome, a Newsom-DeSantis contest in which one candidate wins a clear majority. We can but hope.
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