Democrats Need a Ron DeSantis
Power is everything.
1. Power
It will take weeks—maybe years—to unpack the full implications of last night. But I want to start from the biggest, most immediate problem:
At the federal level there will be no power center from which to organize resistance against Trumpism.
The White House will not have any Mike Pences or John Kellys in it.
The Supreme Court will likely soon have a full majority—five justices—appointed by Trump. And that’s just the floor. He could get to six.
The Senate could be controlled by Republicans for the next decade.
It is still possible as of this writing that Democrats gain a tiny majority in the House and if so that would be important. But at this point, I would not bet cash money on it.
What this fully unified and politicized control of the federal government will mean is that there will be no power center around which opposition to Trump’s actions can be organized. And he also happens to possess a newly created writ of criminal immunity.
Also: There will not be a national political figure around whom resistance can rally. Joe Biden is in eclipse. Kamala Harris has been soundly rejected by the public. There is no one to bind the opposition together, to rally a force around in order to create a popular movement to oppose Trumpism.
When you look at the national stage, Donald Trump stands utterly triumphant. Unopposed. Without a credible rival even on the distant horizon. His forces are marshaled while the opposition is scattered and leaderless.
What this means is that the task of pushing back against Trump will fall to the state level. It will be up to some Democratic governor to turn his or her state into the locus of opposition to Trumpism.
In this, their model should be Ron DeSantis.