DeSantis's Time Will Come, but Trump Has Unfinished Business to Attend to First

DeSantis's Time Will Come, but Trump Has Unfinished Business to Attend to First

BY MARK ELLIS 

AP Photo/John Raoux

Trump loyalists get it about Gov. Ron DeSantis. You can be foursquare committed to a candidate and still understand the prudence of having good potential prospects in the wings.

The Florida governor guided his state through COVID-19 with the kind of resolute leadership and anti-propagandist wisdom that left the Democrats floundering in their baldly partisan display of crisis-conserving overreach. Though they are loathe to admit it, the Blue State firmament now grasps how fully their pandemic ploy is exposed; DeSantis stands as a leader who got the response to COVID right.

DeSantis may have come in a distant second in the CPAC poll, but he was second. He routinely shows evidence of the kind of good-sense decision-making and political savvy that could someday secure the White House for Republicans. His admonition to “stop the mask theater” — addressed to schoolchildren but aimed squarely at the “adults” in the room — was an off-the-cuff, spontaneous public relations masterstroke.

Free the children from this madness. Trump loyalists must wonder if, in the same set of circumstances, even 45 would have done that.

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So, appoint Gov. DeSantis as heir apparent. While he is definitely his own man, crown him the successor to Trump’s America First movement. It is already happening.

And yet as much as some in the GOP wish the era of Trump to be gone — some with personal grievance issues and some with valid concerns about Trump and the future of the party — there’s a much-too-compelling storyline surrounding the former president and a deep-seated sense of the need for political justice.

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Even if you concede that Biden fairly won the election (a stretch of Herculean proportions), there was nonetheless a concerted and extralegal effort to undo Trump’s presidency, a collusive plot that reached to the highest levels of government. No matter the sterling credentials of Ron DeSantis or any other worthy contender, it is going to be hard, probably impossible, for the Trump Troops to let that go without a fight to the finish. Unless Trump declines to run, a prospect which seems less likely with each news cycle, he will get his chance to avenge what was done to him and his millions of supporters.

A 2024 rematch is the stuff of legend, of myth. Trump’s ascendance is already enshrined as one of the most singular developments in political history. The narrative cries out for a fitting resolution, a fair fight this time, with the Biden administration’s rotten performance cast front and center, the superiority of Trump’s policies as plain as daylight, and mechanisms in place to at the very least attempt to count the votes with impartial oversight and accuracy.

If Trump is tanned, rested, and ready, no GOP candidate on God’s green earth will deny him and his majority supporters a second tilt at the Deep State, the slavering leftist media, and the dark and deposed scandal-monger, Hillary Clinton. Unless Mr. Trump’s state of good health is compromised or in lieu of unforeseen run-busting developments, there’s no way he walks away from that.

There is something awesome about the way Ron DeSantis operates. He’s not timid about frontal attacks on the corrosive and authoritarian left. He has a sixth sense about when to deploy humor to point up the idiocy of his Democrat adversaries and when to wax deadly serious about the plans they have for America. He displays the comportment, the charisma, and the strong leadership qualities needed to face the threat of unmasked Marxist globalism. He will downplay any presidential aspirations, for now, because that’s what you do.

But Sunshine State native son Ron DeSantis’s time is on the horizon. On a checklist of issues facing the United States, he comes down near-perfectly from a conservative standpoint. And he’s certainly got style. There are other good potential Republican presidential candidates, but one who might be better does not readily come to mind.

Before Governor DeSantis’s time comes, there’s a bit of business that needs attending to.  There are too many things to list here that Democrats cannot be permitted to get away with.

And for history, mythos, and justice to be reconciled, Donald Trump has first rights to hold them accountable.